Author: Ambrose Ibsen
Date: 2016-02-16 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Thriller; Mystery; Fantasy; Horror; Paranormal; Fiction
Description: Some Places Should Stay Abandoned... Dr. Siegfried Klein has vanished on a mysterious pilgrimage to an abandoned infirmary in the ghost-town of Moonville. The locals in the surrounding areas are tight-lipped, hostile to outsiders. Local legend has it that the old Sick House is packed with spirits, none of them friendly, and that to set foot in it is to enter Hell itself. Enter Harlan Ulrich, private investigator and skeptic. Traveling to the site, the detective begins the long process of separating truth from grisly local myth, and during his investigation stumbles upon certain frightful evide

THE SICK HOUSE
a novel

BY AMBROSE IBSEN

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Copyright 2016 by Ambrose Ibsen

All Rights Reserved

Chapter 1

Harlan Ulrich picked up the tin on his desk, giving it a little shake.

“Oh, thank God.”

The rattling of coffee beans could be heard from within. Prying off the lid, he peered inside. There looked to be just enough for a single cup. Standing up from his desk, he sought out his hand-grinder on a shelf overburdened with books and folios and took to carefully pouring the precious beans into it. Then, pacing around the cluttered office, he began to turn the handle.

“One day you'll have to do without beans, Harlan. But not today,” he told himself, turning the handle clockwise and watching with child-like wonder as the fresh grounds accumulated in the glass hopper. When the grinding was through, he pulled a water bottle from his bag and knocked aside piles of old mail in order to unearth his electric kettle.

He poured nearly three-fourths of the water into the vessel, taking special care not to over or under-fill it, and then set it to boil. With great speed, he rifled through the drawers of his desk for his steel funnel. It wasn't so aesthetic as the ceramic pour-over systems the cafes in town used, but it got the job done. Into this, he placed a crumpled paper filter, which was subsequently dampened with a touch of water. The grounds were added and the whole apparatus was placed on the window sill as he waited for the water to finish boiling.

He sighed, tugging on the hem of his vest. It was cold in the office, the chill of late autumn creeping in through the seams of the door and the poorly insulated window. Come winter, he'd be able to see his breath inside, and there'd be a thin film of ice forming on the inside of the windowpane. Ulrich grimaced, recalling the brutality of Toledo winters. He was a creature much opposed to the cold, and the winter months in Northwest Ohio never failed to leave him miserable. He kept the thermostat just high enough to keep the pipes from bursting whenever the temperatures dipped below freezing, and hoped constantly that the old woman who ran the deli downstairs would crank up her heat and warm his place by proxy. To do otherwise would be too damn expensive.

The kettle clicked off.

Ulrich let the water sit till it'd cooled just shy of boiling, and then, carrying the kettle to the window, he slowly dampened the grounds. The smell of fresh coffee filled the air, drawing a satisfied sigh from his chapped lips. When the grounds had been fully soaked, he continued to pour the water into the filter, meticulously wetting the grounds in a clockwise, then counter-clockwise fashion, till the kettle was empty. This was done to assure an even steep and to avoid brewing bitter, undrinkable coffee. The drip-drip of the stuff as it streamed into his mug from the funnel was a soothing reassurance that he would soon enjoy a bolus of caffeine, a boost he sorely needed on this chill, disagreeable morning. While the coffee finished brewing, he ambled to the closet and picked up his old boombox. Some music, a bit of Sinatra, would be the pièce de résistance, the final ingredient to a blissful morning.

He'd been out of work for a while, had had some trouble in rummaging up a fresh case. Or, at least, a worthwhile case. There was plenty of work to be had in dreary Toledo if one was willing to throw standards to the wind. There'd been a handful of inquiries in the past few weeks, but none of them had been interesting enough to warrant his attention. If something intriguing didn't come around and pique his interest soon, he'd either have to take whatever crap came his way or skip out on rent. He didn't dwell on that, though. Ulrich was determined to make it a pleasant morning; good coffee, good music and a bit of solitude were all he needed. If the business should fold due to his inaction, then so be it. He was in no mood to rescue it, to waste time on advertisements or in courting new clients. Perhaps things would be better that way, he thought as he rifled through his closet. For too long now the work had been boring and unrewarding.

On mornings like this one, when his mood was foul and funds were low, he always had trouble recalling just why it was he'd taken up this line of work. One too many detective novels in his adolescence, probably, had trumped up the allure of a career in private investigation. In reality, his was a humdrum existence. Paperwork, red tape, involving himself in the monotony of other people's lives. That was all there was to it. The thought of taking on another boring job, of dealing with some vapid client, was enough to make him want to throw in the towel.

It was while he palmed away a thin veneer of dust from the top of the boombox and plugged it in that he heard the sound of someone mounting the stairs outside. He stiffened, the dripping of the coffee dying out.

Someone was heading up to his office.

Grimacing, he switched on the boombox, the disc within spitting out a grainy rendition of “Mr. Success” at once. A favorite of his. He loved the way it started with an energetic swell from the band. Ordinarily the first few bars were sufficient to improve his mood, though as the sound of footsteps mounting the stairwell persisted, the usual joy proved absent.

The first knock came a few moments later. Just like that Ulrich could feel his grasp on the day weakening. His relaxing morning ritual was being interrupted before he could even take a sip of his coffee, before he even had a chance to sing along with the first chorus. And for what? Someone wanted something from him, but he was in no mood to give. Looking to the door narrowly, his face grew flush.

No, he thought. Not today. Go away, damn you.

Ulrich turned up the volume, pretended not to hear the knocking, and pulled the funnel from his mug.

Then the second knock came, more urgent than the last.

He held the mug to his lips, the delicious steam teasing the tip of his nose. Who the hell was it? It was early, on a Monday. It wasn't the woman from the deli; the knock was too forceful, too impatient for that. A creditor, maybe? He shook his head. No, probably someone looking to hire him. Someone looking to take up his time with a groan-worthy request for investigation. They were damn early, whoever they were.

Another turn of the volume knob. Go away. Just go away. It's not a good time. Leave me in peace. Can't you see I'm trying to enjoy my morning? I have something beautiful here.

There was a pause in the knocking. Ulrich waited, listening for the sounds of the knocker's retreat while hopefully tapping his foot to the tune. Perhaps they'd given up, changed their mind. Maybe he'd be able to drink his coffee in peace and enjoy his morning after all.

No such luck.

A third knock.

Groaning, he set down his mug and rushed towards the door, throwing it open roughly and giving his visitor a terrible fright. From the first, he leveled his steely eyes on the knocker, his greying eyebrows gravely knit. He made no effort to hide his scowl. “You know what you've done?” he bellowed in competition with Ol' Blue Eyes. “It's like interrupting a church service, pounding on my door like that so early in the day, while I'm still getting myself squared away.” Ulrich lashed out before even getting a proper look at the man who stood outside his door. It didn't really matter who was knocking; it might've been the Dalai Lama himself and Ulrich's response would have been just as venomous.

The visitor, a paunchy, balding fellow in a cheap suit, took a step backward, eyes wide. He was a fair bit shorter than Ulrich, and braced himself against the nearest wall as though he feared for his safety.

“Well, what do you want, then?” Ulrich placed a thin arm against the door frame and leaned to one side, glaring expectantly at his visitor. The edge of his vest rode up, revealing his slight waist and the hastily tucked bottom of his gingham dress shirt.

“Y-you're Harlan Ulrich, the private investigator, aren't you?” the man stammered. He pressed his hammy hands together till the swollen tips of his fingers turned reddish.

“Mr. Success” finished and a quieter tune began. Ulrich dampened his lips and gave a nod, followed by a grunt.

The man continued. “Right, well, I've come here in the hopes that you might be able to help me out. I've got a case for you, and--”

Ulrich raised one of his hands and waved the man away. “Not a good time.” With that, he slowly stepped back into the room and closed the door. Punching one of the buttons on the boombox, he returned to “Mr. Success” and cranked up the volume afresh.

I'm not in the mood for running errands. That greasy cur can get--

During a lull in the music, the man in the hall chanced to squeak. “Sir, it's important, and I'm in a great hurry. I'll pay you well, of course. But time is of the essence.”

Glaring at the door, and then peering at the steaming cup of coffee on his desk, he ran his tongue along his molars. “Urgent?” he mumbled. “Yes, yes, I'm sure it's very urgent.” Ulrich rolled his eyes. Plucking up the mug, he took a sip of the hot brew and sighed, sending a cloud of steam across his face.

The coffee was perfect; there were light notes of chocolate and caramel to be found there. It was from a local roaster, something of a rare bean, and had been masterfully selected. Like a fine wine he sipped and sniffed, enjoying the warmth it gifted him. With every gulp his body loosened, the tension in his shoulders disappearing and a slight smile widening across his lips.

Savoring his coffee, he glanced askance at the door and slowly paced towards it. Perhaps it was simply the caffeine, but he was feeling suddenly magnanimous. More likely, his subconscious mind had reminded him with that single sip that he'd just run out of beans, and that without more money, he'd be doing without coffee for a long time. Opening the door just a touch, he glanced at the man in the hall, who stood timidly at the top of the stairs with his eyes low. “What's your name?” he demanded, his voice stifled by the lip of his mug.

The man looked up, a flicker of relief flashing across his sweaty visage. “Oh, it's Jerome. Jerome Klein.” He held out his thick, pink hand to shake.

Ulrich slurped up more coffee and glared at the man's hand narrowly. Then, looking him in the eyes, which were still cloudy with fright, Ulrich opened the door a bit further and retreated into his office, turning down the boombox. “Come in,” he said, sighing.

This man is going to ask you to run some trivial errand. To track down his dog, to spy on his cheating wife. Be that as it may, he thought, looking to the now-empty tin of coffee on his desk, these are dire circumstances. As he dropped into his chair, the lumpy seat shifting beneath him, he motioned to his visitor to close the door and then reclined, mug in hand.

Jerome ambled towards the desk awkwardly, glancing around the room like he expected to be offered a seat. There was no seat to be found, however. The investigator's faded office chair was the only seat in the office. He was to stand before Ulrich's desk as though awaiting judgement, and twitched nervously all the while like an insect skirting a hungry spider's web. Palming at his forehead, he gave a quick bob of his head. “T-thanks for seeing me.”

Sniffing at his cup, Ulrich pursed his lips. He didn't like the look of this man, Jerome, his nervous demeanor proving most agitating. Gritting his teeth, he resolved to consider his case anyway. Just do it for the beans, goddammit. “All right, Mr. Klein,” began Ulrich, taking a pen from his top drawer and tearing away a sheet of paper from the nearest legal pad. “I'm a very busy man,” he lied. “But let's see if I can't fit your case in. What can I do for you this fine morning?”

Burying his hands in the pockets of his slacks, the man leaned forward. “I, uh... I need you to find someone for me.”

Ulrich arched a brow. “Missing person?”

Jerome nodded.

A missing person's case? It'd been a long time since he'd had one of those fall into his lap. Something like real excitement stirred in him; a bit premature, maybe, but the investigator was interested at least in hearing the details. Rapping a staccato beat against the desk with his pen, he gave a nod. “Go on.”

Chapter 2

If there was anything to like about Jerome Klein, it was that he was quick in divulging the generalities of his case, hitting upon the points most important to Ulrich within the first few minutes of their dialogue. In fact, despite his nervousness, Jerome's entire spiel seemed rehearsed somehow. This was probably not the first consultation he'd made with a private investigator regarding the matter.

Before Jerome could finish, Ulrich took a slurp from his mug and presented him with a question of his own. “Wait, why is it you're seeking my services in this case? Did someone refer you?”

Jerome nodded weakly.

“Who?”

Licking his lips, the reply came almost too softly to be heard. “Edgar Hudson, the private investigator.”

Ulrich's eyes narrowed in fondness and he peered up to the ceiling in smiling reverie. “Oh, Hudson sent you, did he? Why, I haven't seen him in ages. The two of us used to be close; I knew him as a student many years back. I'm surprised he couldn't handle this for you. Too heavy a case-load, perhaps?”

Jerome tittered nervously, before suddenly clamming up. “Not quite.”

“How do you mean?”

He blanched. “I couldn't afford his services. He said you were, uh... more in my price range.”

Ulrich took a long sip of coffee, draining his mug. “Huh.” Such referrals from his contemporaries were more common than he liked to admit. Though he got on well with his peers in the area, he also carried a reputation for laziness and lowbrow incompetence. If any job was too simple or demeaning for the likes of Hudson et al, they wouldn't hesitate to send inquirers Ulrich's way. They all charged more than Ulrich did, too; they had the reputations to command higher prices. It didn't help, of course, that Ulrich often loathed his own clients and would go to great lengths not to accept new cases. Though he wouldn't have necessarily termed himself lazy, it would not have been a stretch to call him reticent where work was concerned. Ulrich preferred to pass his time reading, drinking coffee or taking in films. More often than not, his cases were mere interruptions to his life's passions-- necessary evils he had to face in order to keep the money flowing.

He had to actively restrain himself from ordering Jerome out of his office that very instant, and was a few moments in calming down. Still, he needed the money. There was no way around it. Like it or not, he'd have to hear this paunchy clown out. It's always easier, he reminded himself, if the client doesn't know you hate him. He ran a hand through his graying hair, leaving it a tousled mess, and then cleared his throat. “So, you want me to find your... uncle, is that right?”

“That's right.”

“Start again, from the top. And tell me a bit about yourself.”

Jerome took a deep breath and launched once more into the details of his case. “My name is Jerome Klein, and I've lived here in town my whole life. I sell used cars not ten minutes from here, at Watley's Dealership on South Main. My uncle, Dr. Siegfried Klein, went missing one month ago, and now that the police have all but quit on me, I'd like for you to find him.”

Ulrich took a few moments to process this, appraising his visitor coldly and making him sweat. Jerome certainly looked the part of a used car salesman. Lower-middle class, judging by the make of his suit, and presumably unmarried for the lack of a wedding band. Middle-aged and fairly overweight, Ulrich had a hard time believing that Jerome's nervousness was owed solely to concern for his vanished uncle. But what, then, had him so worked up? Ulrich had been vicious, maybe, but that couldn't have been it, either. Thenceforth, Ulrich started into his own line of questions, fleshing out the narrative and taking down the important details. “You and your uncle Siegfried are close, I take it?”

Jerome hesitated. “Well, sort of. But I actually haven't seen him in quite a while. Not since Easter, if memory serves.”

“How were you made aware of his disappearance?”

“My uncle,” began Jerome, “did keep in contact with me fairly regularly. Now and then he'd call for a chat. You know, just to see how things were going. A month ago, he phoned to let me know that he was heading out to the country on a house-call. He's a retired physician, but still does charity work down in Vinton County.”

“Vinton County?” Ulrich closed his eyes, wobbling back and forth in his chair while trying to conjure a mental map. “That's down south, the middle of nowhere, unless I'm mistaken?”

“That's right. My uncle moved there after retiring from a prestigious teaching post at the Ohio State University Hospital in Columbus. He grew up in McArthur, and decided on a whim to return there to live out his retirement. It's quiet down there... not a lot to do. I've only ever been once or twice in my life, and I have to say I don't really like it. Too many trees and empty houses and such...”

“So, he called to let you know he was making a house call. Anything else? Did he say anything strange, anything that might have made him seem as though he'd been targeted by someone? Do you know perchance what patient he was setting off to visit?”

At this point, the timid Jerome grew grave. Loosing a shuddering sigh, he rummaged around in the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a folded piece of yellowed paper. Unfolding it slowly, he looked down at it for some time and continued. “This is where things get weird. He knows the area well, has a good reputation, and sees a lot of patients in and around McArthur. But, one day, about a month ago, he tells me he gets this note in the mail, asking him to pay a visit to a house in Moonville.” At the utterance of this name, Jerome shivered. He continued quickly, stammering a bit. “M-moonville, you see, is a ghost town. No one lives there anymore. It's close to McArthur, and there are all kinds of stories surrounding the place. Most of the roads about that area are gravel, or else in real bad shape. Lots of abandoned houses. I dunno, I was under the impression that no one lived there anymore. But my uncle tells me he got this letter from someone in a place called the 'Sick House'. Guess it used to be a care home of some kind for the seriously ill. Run by nuns, or so I've since been told. Uncle Siegfried didn't think anyone still stayed there, but apparently planned to go anyhow. He said he'd hike there, as the weather was good and he knew the area like the back of his hand. My uncle has always been a pretty strong guy. Loves to hike and fish and such, so I didn't think it so strange that he should want to hike up to this house in the middle of nowhere.”

Ulrich jotted down a note and then pressed his fingertips together. “And then?”

“Well, that's the last I've heard of him, unfortunately. Next thing I know, I'm getting calls from people he knows, asking if maybe he's come up to Toledo for a visit with me or something. No one's seen him in a while-- not since he supposedly planned to visit that Sick House place. His housekeeper says she saw him setting out. The owner of a diner in town swears he came in for a meal before heading off on foot, but other than that, no one's seen him. It wasn't such a long walk; he probably could have walked the whole way and back in about half a day. But he hasn't turned up. It wasn't long before the cops got involved. They went looking for him, of course, but out there we've only got access to the State Highway Patrol, and they're already mighty overworked, so they didn't make much headway. Searched a lot of woods, a lot of fields, even paid the old Sick House a visit.”

“And what did they find?” Ulrich was leaning forward in his chair, brow furrowed. He licked at his upper lip. The case was proving more and more interesting to him by the moment.

“That's the thing; they didn't find anything. That old place looked like it'd been abandoned for years and years. Locals say that it's been empty since the fifties. I wouldn't know anything about that, as it was before my time. But no matter where they looked, they found no sign of him. It's like he just got swallowed up as he went walking down the road.” Slowly, Jerome handed Ulrich the piece of yellowed paper in his hand. “This is the note he got in the mail, asking for a visit. It was on his desk in his apartment, and I snatched it up because I thought it might be important.”

Accepting the note, Ulrich cleared his throat and inspected it with some thoroughness. The script was flowing, feminine and not a little antiquated. The paper, too, showed obvious signs of age, with its corners being all the yellower for over-exposure to the sun. The slip felt coarse against his fingers and reeked of dust. Before he'd even read a single word he found himself crinkling his nose in disgust.

The message found therein was simple and innocent enough: Attention, Dr. Siegfried Klein of McArthur. Your expertise is requested at the Sylvan Infirmary in Moonville. The sisters require a consultation on a patient whose condition is quite dire. Please make haste.

The letter was undated, but was signed with the initials “A.B.” Setting the paper down, Ulrich pressed his client. “Who is 'A.B.'?”

“I have no idea. Cops weren't sure either.”

“This Sylvan Infirmary, I take it that's the proper name of this so-called 'Sick House'?”

“Yes. No one calls it that anymore, though. It's just the Sick House to the people down there. And, I tell you, the locals don't seem to like the place a whole lot. They have all kinds of stories about it. They say it's haunted, that the spirits of former patients are trapped there, or that just walking in can get you really and truly damned. I heard that--”

Ulrich smirked, raising up one of his hands. “Superstitions, you mean? Yes, it would not surprise me to hear that a bunch of backwoods yokels have spooky stories to share about an old infirmary in the middle of a ghost town. Please, Jerome, don't muddy the waters with talk of urban legends and the like. I'd much prefer for us to handle this investigation in a reasonable fashion.” He sniffed the air, turning his attention once more to the note. “It was run by nuns?”

“Yes.”

“But it's been abandoned since the 1950's?”

“By all accounts, yes.”

Ulrich nodded. “So it seems your uncle may have been lured there under false pretenses. Tell me, did he have any enemies? Anyone who would see him killed or kidnapped for any reason?”

Jerome seemed genuinely offended at the question, and denied it vehemently. “Not in the least. I'll tell you one thing, and I'd swear it on my life, my uncle is a kind, giving man. Everyone loves him. It's simply unthinkable that someone out there would want to hurt him. He's a local, grew up in McArthur, and has given so much back to that community. It's out of the question. I'm convinced that there was simply some kind of accident. Maybe he hurt himself and got lost. Or...” His eyes wandered for a time, and some of his earlier timidity returned in the form of a slight shudder.

“Or...?” said Ulrich with an arch of his brow. “The boogieman of the Sick House got him? Is that it?”

Jerome said nothing, but lowered his eyes as if in shame.

“Your uncle... has he a wife? Any children of his own?”

To each of these inquiries, Jerome answered in the negative. “No, he never married. And he doesn't have any kids. When my father passed twenty years ago, he stepped into my life and helped me out with a lot of things. Paid for school and whatnot... I guess he's always treated me like his son, and I look up to him as a kind of father figure.”

Lot of good that did, his paying for your school. Here you are selling used cars for a living. He must be so proud of you. Ulrich's lips curled into a smirk, but he banished it as he stood up from behind his desk. He set his empty mug on the windowsill and put his hands behind his back, pacing thoughtfully between the desk and closet. The carpet in this spot was well-worn from countless such episodes in the past. This was his favorite place to think. “If this is the case, and you were the one contacted about his disappearance, then I imagine you're considered Dr. Klein's next of kin? His heir, perhaps?” He shot Jerome a narrow look and tried to beat back another grin.

Jerome appeared flabbergasted, and threw out his chubby hands in defense. “I-it's not like what you're thinking.”

Ah, so this was the true source of Jerome's nervous demeanor. The man didn't want to look like the guilty party. Still, he didn't appear to be the culprit, despite having everything to gain in the event of the victim's death or disappearance. “Sure, sure,” replied Ulrich, stroking at his stubbly chin amusedly. “And what am I thinking, precisely, Jerome?”

“Y-yeah, my uncle's written me into his will as his heir a-and he's left me quite a lot in the event of his passing, it's true.” Jerome gulped. “But it's not like that. I wouldn't want anything to happen to the man, and I sure as hell didn't have anything to do with it, if that's what you're saying.”

Ulrich chortled, dropping a hand into his pocket and looking to his client with a mix of pity and amusement. “I've no reason to doubt what you've said, though if your uncle really is as well-loved as you say and he had no enemies to speak of, then, as of now, you're the only one with a motive that I can think of.” In watching Jerome's eyes widen, Ulrich continued. “Fair enough, though. I trust you, Jerome. Your uncle has disappeared on a hike to some abandoned infirmary and you'd like for me to find him. I think I can handle this case. Perhaps he really did just suffer an accident on the way. It's very possible that there's no culprit in this, no foul play whatsoever. Though, that note there gives me pause.” He stretched a little, straightening his posture and puffing his chest out. “There are a few things I'll need before I begin, however.”

Jerome's eyes lit up and he sat upright. “Just say the word! I'll do all I can.”

Ulrich took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling. In the corner, he found a small brown ring marring the drywall. Focusing on the bit of water damage, he grimaced and began tracing his route mentally. “In order for me to get from Toledo to McArthur, I'm going to have to do a good bit of driving. Likely three to four hours, depending on traffic. You say that the roads are poor near the ghost town of Moonville, however it is chiefly in this area that I'll need to conduct my investigation.” He turned to Jerome and grinned. “You deal in cars, yes?”

Jerome chuckled. “Well, yes...”

“I'll need something reliable to drive there in. Something meaty, big tires. You understand?”

“Sure, sure,” replied the client, pawing at his knees. “I... can borrow something from the dealership and lend it to you for this case, no problem. A hearty SUV or truck. Anything else?”

Ulrich licked his lips. “It must have a CD player.”

Jerome cocked his head to the side. “Wait, a CD player? That's not a problem, but... why?”

Ulrich looked to his boombox for a moment, which was still spitting out a steady stream of Sinatra. “Do not question my methods, Mr. Klein.” He cleared his throat. “Aside from this, I'll require money for gas and half of my payment up front. I've a short contract here for you to sign, should you decide to take me up on my terms. Fair?”

“Yes, sir! That won't be a problem.”

Nodding firmly, Ulrich knelt down and wrenched open the stubborn bottom drawer of his desk. Within, there were numerous manilla folders. Flicking through them, he found a folder stuffed with blank contracts and removed one. It was a simple document, a mere two pages, and somewhat faded for its having been Xeroxed dozens of times over the years. “Review the terms of payment and place your initials after each line, Mr. Klein. Then, I'd like for you to sign at the bottom of the second page. When you've done that, I'll take half of my payment, the keys to a suitable vehicle, some money for gas and some small details to aid me in my search; addresses, names, things of that nature.”

Jerome leaned over the edge of the desk and slowly signed off on the terms. He'd made it half-way through the list when something caught his eye. He looked up incredulously, cracking a smile. “What... what's this here, about a bag of single origin coffee being included in your payment?”

Ulrich said nothing for a time, but merely stared his client in the face. “Well,” he eventually replied, “I suppose that we are short on time for this case. I'd be willing to accept a Starbucks gift certificate instead.” He stamped his foot down theatrically. “A man needs a muse, Mr. Klein. Something to keep him going when things turn sour!”

Shaking his head, Jerome returned to the contract.

Chapter 3

It wasn't that Ulrich didn't have a car of his own; it was that the newish SUV that Jerome lent him was better suited to the trip ahead than his own aging Passat. The bells and whistles it came with, half of which he didn't even know how to use, may have been superfluous; but as he drove the thing to his apartment there was one thing he couldn't deny.

His Best of Sinatra CD sounded damn good in it.

When the arrangements had been made well into the afternoon, Jerome had driven over the SUV, dropped off the keys, half of his payment in cash, and gas money, as per Ulrich's instructions. Moreover, tucked into the sun visor, had been a Starbucks gift card for twenty-five dollars to keep him going on his journey. Jerome's only request was that Ulrich take good care of the vehicle; it was a lender, a high-end model usually reserved for employees at his dealership. “Please, bring her back in one piece,” he'd urged.

Pleased with all of this, Ulrich had done his part and gathered some other details to aid him in his investigations. A photo of the missing doctor, the addresses and names of those who'd known him well, Jerome's own contact information, the names of the State Highway Patrol personnel who'd carried out the initial investigation and more. With his notepad well-stocked with information, he bid Jerome a good evening and set off for his apartment just as the sun was beginning to set and a terrible cold was settling in over the city.

His one-bedroom apartment was in an older building, a five-minute car ride from his office, and a good deal less cluttered. He spent little time there, and so had no occasion to accumulate the mounds of junk he kept in his office. It was a space he used for sleeping, eating, doing laundry and putzing about on those rare days when he didn't bother going to work. Mounting the stairs of the austere lobby, he entered his unit and locked the door behind him. Once inside, he blindly ran a hand across the wall and nudged a light switch, turning on the chintzy brass chandelier in the living room. One of the bulbs had gone out, leaving the place dimmer and smokier-looking than normal. The air was cold, nearly as cold as it was outside. Just like his office, Ulrich chose to keep the heater on low in order to minimize his heating bill, and hoped that the adjacent units would insulate his own.

Rubbing at his arms, he tossed the keys to the SUV onto a side table and paced into the kitchen for a glass of water. He considered fixing himself a simple supper before starting into his pre-investigation research, but upon peering inside the fridge he found only a jar of old mustard and a clamshell of wilted lettuce. Sighing, he ambled into the bedroom. The bed, wildly unmade, was cluttered with flattened pillows and a book he'd fallen asleep with the previous night. He'd been reading a Raymond Chandler novel, and at glancing it he felt the intoxicating pull of distraction. No, no reading books tonight. You've got work to do. Real work, for once. Picking up the half-fallen comforter, he tossed it onto the bed and made his way to the closet.

From the very back of the narrow closet he pulled a grey, heavy woolen coat. Patting it down and watching as small clouds of dust escaped from the dense material, he set it on the bed and then took to picking out a few more articles well-suited to the cold weather he'd have to face during his investigation. This case would see him spending a good deal of time outdoors in the chill autumn. The last thing he wanted was to come down with a pneumonia for his trouble.

An old valise was packed carefully with dress shirts, undergarments, slacks and more. Enough clothes to last him a few days. When he'd filled in the empty spaces with toiletries and some other small items, he hauled the thing out to the living room and set it beside the front door.

The apartment didn't seem especially inviting to him tonight. He decided he'd head out to a cafe, get a bite to eat and do his research till closing time. It was approaching 7 PM. If he hurried, he could find a table at Grounds for Thought, the cozy cafe downtown that served great sandwiches, before all of the college students staked out the best spots. He took up his laptop bag from its spot on the worn leather sofa in the living room. When the lights were out and the door was locked, Ulrich set off for the cafe. Tapping confusedly at the stereo, whose numerous buttons promised of bewildering and frivolous effects, he finally got his CD to play. He sang along to “I'll Be Around” on repeat until he entered the cafe parking lot.

***

The cafe was bustling for a Monday night. Ulrich walked in, the collar of his jacket pulled up to his ears, and stepped to the back of a long line just as “Flamenco Sketches” was winding to a close from a nearby record player. From behind the counter the smell of dark roast coffee reached out and slapped some warmth into his flushed cheeks. Rubbing his hands together, he adjusted the strap of his bag, the heavy computer within putting a strain on his shoulder. There were a handful of open tables in the far corners of the shop, any one of which would do nicely. Breaking from the line he ambled over to the table nearest the long window that faced the street outside and set down his bag. He pulled from it his laptop, a chunky old thing that froze up on him with little provocation and hiccoughed through even the simplest of applications. Plugging it in, he waited for it to boot up completely before ambling back to the line and placing his order.

Ulrich opted for a roasted turkey sandwich and a tall black coffee, paying for it with one of the crisp twenties Jerome had paid him with. As he handed over the bill to the cashier and accepted his change, he found himself thinking about the case at hand for the very first time since that afternoon. Very soon, within the next twenty-four hours, he'd be seeking out a missing person in an unfamiliar place. It was more excitement than he'd had in ages, and the details of the case made for not a little intrigue. Taking his food over to the table, he sat down and started into his sandwich, browsing the web mindlessly for a time.

Try as he might however, he could not keep his thoughts from returning to the case.

What was this feeling?

Was he actually looking forward to his work? It was unthinkable.

A missing doctor in a rural ghost town. A note on yellowed paper from a mysterious sender. This was a step up from his usual work. Ulrich was pleased with himself, felt like a proper detective for the first time in a long while. Hudson can get lost. He passed up a good one this time. He'd recently gone looking for missing pets, had looked into illicit extramarital affairs carried out in seedy hotels and entertained other cases of a similarly tedious nature. But this time, he had something respectable and exciting. Grinning, he dug into his meal and thought about how great a story this one would make. Oh, he'd find the old doctor. Dead or alive, he'd find him out there. Ulrich would carry out a thorough investigation, cut through all of the superstitious crap that the locals clung to and emerge as a man of reason, an unparalleled mind. This one, he felt, would make for quite the notch on his belt, perhaps a major highlight in his memoirs.

Ulrich opened his notebook, finding within the mess of notes he'd taken throughout the day. Tucked between the first two pages, was the picture of the missing doctor Jerome had given him for reference. Though some years old, the picture was recent enough to be useful to the investigator. It'd evidently been taken at some holiday function, with the doctor, a tall and somewhat thin man not altogether different in frame than Ulrich himself, standing against a wall draped in colorful garlands. He wore a broad, warm smile across a cleanly-shaven face and appeared rather youthful despite his years.

Jerome had claimed the man to possess a good deal of strength and energy, and this claim was certainly borne out in the man's stature and air of intelligence. The eyes, their corners wrinkled in a smile, carried something within them of brightness and exactitude. These were the eyes of a man whose soul had been tempered by years of important work and constant study. He was largely bald, with a wreath of grey, wispy hair flanking the sides of his head. Bespectacled, the doctor was dressed conservatively in a black suit jacket, white shirt and simple tie. Placing the photograph on the table beside his computer and setting his now empty plate aside, Ulrich cleansed his palate with a sip of coffee and squinted at it, rocking very slightly in his seat. “Where have you gone, doctor?” he muttered under his breath.

Without much trouble, Ulrich dreamt up a few possible ideas concerning the old doctor's whereabouts. Jerome had painted the man as a saint, and though there was no reason as yet to doubt his reputation, there existed, too, a chance that the missing physician's hands were unclean in some manner. Maybe he'd ended up in debt and faked his death to escape creditors. Perhaps there was some scandal involving a patient, or lover, and he'd been taken out to keep the whole thing under wraps. It was possible, too, that he'd just overestimated his strength, fallen somewhere deep in the woods during his hike, and succumbed to the elements. Ulrich smirked as he recalled the nervous way Jerome had referred to the superstitions of the folk down in Vinton county. Glaring down at the smiling doctor, he sighed into his cup. “Or could it be that you were spirited away by phantasms, doctor? Is that what happened?”

One thing stood out to him, made him achingly curious as he continued through his notes. The message the doctor had received that'd compelled him out to the infirmary to begin with. Who had sent such a thing, and why? It was an awfully suspicious note, and its sender, “A.B.”, whoever that might've been, would have some explaining to do.

Is it possible that someone murdered the doctor? It was the first time he'd really considered the possibility, and in doing so, he felt the last of his levity leached away. His own self-interest and sense of self-preservation surged to the fore. If Dr. Klein's disappearance was owed to something nefarious, then Ulrich himself might end up walking headlong into danger. And in an unfamiliar, rural area, to boot. Any enemies of the missing doctor weren't going to take kindly to him if he started poking around, that much was certain.

He grew pensive for a time. Ulrich wasn't a fool; he knew how to keep a low profile, knew better than to telegraph his presence to the town as a whole. He'd have to work covertly, reveal his intentions only to a select few so as to keep his operations a secret and maintain his safety. No good would come of psyching himself out before he even got there. He'd go about this case the same way he did all of his others; by employing a meticulous attention to detail and keeping his wits about him at all times. In all his years as a detective he'd never once been seriously harmed. This time, he assured himself, would be no different, so long as he stuck to the script and didn't entertain the nonsense spewed by the paranoid locals, or frighten himself prematurely by dreaming up villains that didn't really exist. The simplest explanation was most often the correct one, and in this case, the odds seemed overwhelmingly in favor of a simple hiking accident, rather than something grislier, like murder or kidnapping.

At least, that was what he was hoping for.

The damned note, yellowed and faded, gave him pause. It was the thorn in his side, the piece that refused to fit into the puzzle.

He sipped his coffee and jotted down a short timeline of events. The facts were thus: An aging physician received a hand-written note in a mailbox signed only with the initials “A.B.”, asking him to visit a long-abandoned infirmary. The date of the infirmary's closing, sometime in the 1950's, made for the first entry on the timeline. If Dr. Klein's acquaintance with the area was so great as Jerome claimed it to be, then the doctor, of all people, should have known the place to be abandoned. Nevertheless, he still ventured there, on foot, and went missing in the process. Whether he made it all the way to the “Sick House” or disappeared on the way remained to be seen. Ulrich had the names of the last few people who'd seen him; the owner of a diner, his housekeeper. His interactions with these folk, too, were placed on the timeline. It was doubtful that he would glean anything from these people, but he wished to interview them himself upon his arrival in McArthur, face-to-face. He'd also gotten the name of a local historian and friend of the doctor's, a Professor Tillinghast, who could tell him more about the Sylvan Infirmary, and planned to meet with him.

Armed with this knowledge, he opened a few tabs in his browser and began reading everything he could find about Moonville and its shuttered Sylvan Infirmary. He polished off his coffee as the pages sluggishly loaded. The rattling sound coming from his blocky laptop reminded him of a small plane heading into turbulence. He gripped at the plastic casing of the thing, feeling it warm up slightly for its efforts, and grit his teeth. Come on, old girl. Don't die on me now.

When he was only a few minutes into his reading one of the young baristas, a college-aged woman with a brown ponytail and soiled green apron, approached his table. “Can I interest you in a refresher?” she asked, pointing to his mug.

“Oh, yes, of course,” replied Ulrich, handing it to her with a smile.

“What are you drinking?”

“It was that Dark Roast Sumatran that's on special. Pour-over, please.”

Taking this order, she returned some minutes later with a fresh mug. “Sorry to disturb you, you seemed like you were deep into your work. Mind if I ask what you're reading about?”

Ulrich accepted the mug and palmed it carefully, savoring its warmth. “Oh, just doing a bit of research for a project.”

“School project?”

“No,” he said, his grin widening. “Do I look college-aged to you, miss?” He leaned on one elbow, arching a brow. “I'm a private investigator. Brushing up on some things for one of my new cases.” A smug smile followed, coloring his tone of voice with honey, and it was all he could do not to make it sound like a blatant boast.

Her eyes lit up at once. “Wow, really? That sounds so impressive! It must be a really interesting line of work!” she gushed.

Ulrich laughed, leaning back in his chair. Brushing a palm against his stubbled cheek, he gave a cool shrug. “Well, you know, a man's gotta eat.”

It occurred to him as she walked away that she was right. With this case, his line of work was rather fascinating. Usually he had to boast, lie, to make his cases sound worthwhile. Jerome had brought him a real whopper, though, an intriguing case he'd actually be able to take pride in. For so long he'd forgotten why it was he'd entered into this career of his. No longer.

The spark was back.

Chapter 4

The village of McArthur, Ohio, was a nearly four-hour drive from Ulrich's home in Toledo. The largest settlement in heavily-forested Vinton County, its most recent census revealed there to be less than two-thousand inhabitants. Located more than an hour away from the State capitol of Columbus, it appeared a startlingly remote community, insulated by rolling hills and dense woods; among the densest in the entire Midwest.

And, if Ulrich's frantic Googling was to be believed, they didn't even have a Starbucks.

The wooded area around McArthur was peppered in relictual settlements, among which was the myth-shadowed ghost town of Moonville, where the bulk of Ulrich's investigation was likely to take place. In fact, as he went about his researches, it became abundantly clear that there was a good deal more interest surrounding the abandoned mining town of Moonville than there was in peopled McArthur. Moonville was the site of some well-known Ohio ghost stories, most of which were centered upon the ancient cemetery found there and a long tunnel once used as part of a now-defunct railroad line. Spirits had allegedly been sighted there on numerous occasions over the course of the past century, and the isolated ghost town was a destination for collegiate thrill-seekers from Columbus and beyond. Uninterested in urban myths, Ulrich spent very little time on articles related to the Moonville tunnel and cemetery, and instead focused his attention on the infirmary, now known colloquially as the Sick House, that once operated there.

The Sylvan Infirmary, run by a group of Catholic nuns for the better part of eighty years, was located in an area that was, if the satellite maps online were to be believed, almost completely swollen up by the over-nourished woods. A handful of photographs of the house in its prime, a large, two-story structure built of hearty local lumber, were found easily enough on historical sites. Built in an incongruous Garrison style, the infirmary's second story hung distinctively over the first, setting it quite apart from the smaller, simpler homes found in the town. Featuring a tall exterior chimney, the front of the house boasted three double-hung windows on the upper floor. There were photographs, too, of the nuns with their patients on the grounds surrounding the infirmary. Much of the surrounding woods had evidently been cleared back then, giving the infirm a large area in which to roam and convalesce.

Tourist blogs, chiefly those belonging to amateur ghost hunters, provided more updated photos of the Sylvan Infirmary. Though the general shape was much the same, it was evident that the building had not been maintained in any fashion since the year 1953, when the infirmary was shut down by State authorities. Even as early as the late 1930's, Ulrich read, it was considered unsafe by local practitioners and the patients were gradually transferred to a newer facility in McArthur. The elements had weathered the structure a great deal, giving it the look of something shabby and unstable, where once it'd seemed proud and sturdy. Trees had begun to encroach upon the grounds where patients once spent their days and the whole of the structure was shaded now in that primordial darkness so characteristic of abandoned properties forfeit to the wild.

This was where the old doctor had set off to, and it would be among the first places Ulrich would have to go looking for him.

Ulrich's options for food and accommodations were lamentably few. In downtown McArthur was the Hotel Acardi. This appeared to be the only hotel in the village. There were a few restaurants, reasonably reviewed, within walking distance of these lodgings, but little else worth mentioning. Already he was beginning to dread the drive, the utter remoteness of the place. Still, being isolated from his usual amenities would provide all the impetus he needed to work quickly and efficiently. You'll be there a few days and will make a decent wage for it. Relax. You can survive without access to the internet, to good coffee. Still, as he perused the photographs, spying here and there the sheer abundance of woodland and the unremarkable-looking businesses that comprised the village center, he couldn't help but dismay. The only interesting thing down there would be the case he was working on. It's just as well... no distractions.

On one blog Ulrich stumbled upon a few juicy tidbits that, even if difficult to verify, were intriguing to him. The condition of the Sylvan Infirmary building was known to be unsuitable for patients as early as the late 1930's, however the nuns running the operation were allegedly reticent to close it down and lose their funding from the diocese in Columbus. The blogger, a local hobbyist, wrote that meager attempts had been made at renovation, however the updates were not sufficient to sway State officials who were determined to shut it down, and in the winter of 1953-54, the doors were closed for good. Rumor had it that the nuns continued working in the building for some time after however, defying the authorities and caring for a few patients who were too unstable to make the transfer to McArthur. This tidbit, if true, proved that there'd been activity at the Sick House after its official closure. Had Dr. Klein been aware of this supposed activity beyond the mid-1950's?

There was a lot of information to process. Until he could verify the details of this final rumor, Ulrich knew better than to consider it fact. However, as he appraised the most recent photos of the Sick House afresh, his mug firmly in hand, he couldn't but study its double-hung windows and envisage in their dusty reflections hints of clandestine habitation. What secrets did those worm-eaten wood panels and that tumbledown chimney contain?

Perhaps the nuns still cared for people in that place in the late fifties or sixties, but there's no way in hell anyone's still staying there now. It's obvious just from looking at it. So, why did Dr. Klein go there? He must've known it to be abandoned. Surely nuns aren't still working there? Surely there isn't actually a patient there in need of his care?

The doctor's motive for traveling to the Sick House was a mystery, and it bothered the investigator to no end.

***

The route was mapped, an itinerary sketched out and a number of pressing questions rendered. Ulrich worked at the cafe until nearly midnight. When finally he packed things up, he'd sucked down four coffees and sat through the whole of Kind of Blue, Getz/Gilberto and half a dozen other things somewhere in between. With a plan firmly in place, he staggered numbly into the cold night, hoping to get a few hours of sleep before setting out for McArthur in the morning.

His caffeine tolerance was such that the coffees could not touch his fatigue. He was sore all over from shoehorning his lanky frame into the narrow seat and leaning over his computer for so long. A drive of some few minutes in the SUV saw him land at home, and he was only a few moments in casting off his clothes. He set an alarm for the late morning and jumped into bed headfirst.

But morning came quickly.

When the alarm insisted on his wakefulness, he shoved it off of the nightstand with a grunt of anger and sat up, palming at his temples. The air was dry and he felt somewhat congested. His sleep had been fitful, and the soreness in his throat seemed to indicate long stretches of snoring. He groggily went about his morning routine, brushing his teeth, standing in a lukewarm shower and then shaving. Though he usually wore a beard, or at least stubble, he thought he might look more professional if clean-shaven and broke out his razor. When that was through, he took to dressing himself. A powder blue dress shirt, slacks, belt and leather boots would make a good impression on the locals without seeming too pretentious. He plucked up his woolen jacket and threw it on over the top. From his laptop bag he took his notes, ultimately deciding to leave the computer behind in his apartment. The old heap might not survive the trip, frail as it was.

The morning was marked by a biting cold. It was too early in the year for this sort of chill, as far as he was concerned, and he grumbled as he jumped into the SUV, putting the key in the ignition. He let the thing warm up for a few minutes before pulling out of the parking lot and coasting to the nearest Starbucks. There, he ordered an enormous black coffee with a chocolate muffin and pulled the directions from his notebook. He'd pre-planned his route, and would drive most of the way on I-75 South before branching off onto some country roads. The SUV came with a built-in GPS system, and after some fiddling, he managed to hit the right buttons to set his destination.

The trip seemed simple enough, though as he sipped at his coffee, he couldn't help but bemoan the lengthy drive ahead. Even if everything went according to plan, he was going to face a minimum of four hours behind the wheel. He'd staked out some highway rest stops ahead of time whose facilities he could make use of, but ultimately he had no choice but to power through the drive, with Frank Sinatra as his only companion.

Chapter 5

The road that ultimately led him to McArthur was nondescript, gravelly. Where on the lengthy drive he'd gone off the beaten path and started onto the quaint, uncharted length of rain-soaked road that even the SUV's GPS was unable to put a name to Ulrich hadn't the foggiest. One moment he'd been following the southbound stretch of Interstate 75, only to veer off onto a detour due to unforeseen construction. From there, the way had been muddled for him, and a combination of inclement weather and obscure side streets seemed to throw his navigational systems into a tailspin.

The vehicle had handled wonderfully all the while, and despite his usual aversion to long drives, Ulrich found himself enjoying the trip. It was far easier to make such a journey in a luxuriant vehicle, fueled by hot coffee and singing along discordantly to his disc of Sinatra hits. The gunmetal skies that glowered over him during the portion of his drive from Bowling Green to McArthur were little thought of, and traffic proved surprisingly light. Long stretches of open field, of heavily wooded forest just beyond the shoulder, were robbed of their monotony by the utter novelty he felt at helming the massive SUV. In his Passat the drive would have been a series of bumps and groans from car and driver alike. With its finely-tuned suspension, plush, heated seats and overall spaciousness, the SUV was a whole new world to him. The sound system was crisp, top-of-the-line, and the steering was more responsive than he'd ever thought possible. To him, the vehicle was a marvel, and carved away any displeasure he might've faced in making the hours-long drive to his destination.

That is, until the rain began in earnest and complicated matters.

It'd sprinkled sporadically throughout his drive, however upon his entrance onto that long and unnamed country road which had been mounted in a brief flurry of confusion following the detour, the clouds let loose with what he could only call a tempest. The vehicle, large though it was, became buffeted by strong gusts and sheets of fat raindrops. The road, pebbly and fraught with divots, was quickly awash in a torrent of rain, and the forceful, obscuring patter against his windshield made it so that he could not be sure how much further the slipshod road went on. More than once he considered turning back, finding his way to the highway and reorienting himself.

Ultimately however, he soldiered on, yielding to his stubborn hunch that this was, in fact, the way to McArthur. The tank was full, thanks to a stop at the highway rest station, and his latest coffee was still hot. It was late in the afternoon, but he figured he had some time to kill even if he was mistaken. Cutting speed, Ulrich drove on carefully, looking at his surroundings through the crashing rain and taking note of the overgrown fields which were very quickly becoming overpopulated with dense rows of trees. Denser than anything he'd hitherto seen.

How the scenery had changed over the course of some few hours. Leaving Toledo, he'd seen large buildings, city skylines and such on the entrance ramp and from the lanes. Here, though, signs of civilization seldom emerged from his surroundings. There were deep ruts in the edges of the gravel road; tire tracks, he fancied. Something black and frayed, like the bits of a popped tire, dressed a tall bush whose growth encroached upon the road. Every mile or so he spied what he thought was a food wrapper or plastic bottle, though with the pounding rain it was hard to be sure. The further he went, the more Ulrich began to feel that he was entering a new world. He turned down his music by a few notches and listened to the rain for a time, chilled by it despite his being safe and warm in the SUV, and he began to wonder, too, if he hadn't made some grave misstep in his navigation. He wondered if he hadn't wandered into some place where he didn't belong. A place he wasn't welcome. He'd known himself headed into a region that was noted for its remoteness, but in actually experiencing such isolation he was made surprisingly uncomfortable.

The road never seemed to end. It would veer to one side or the other for a short jaunt before straightening out again and leading him he knew not where. Logging more than ten miles by the odometer, Ulrich began to grow apprehensive, glancing repeatedly at the bright GPS display and cursing silently at the large, blinking question marks that represented his route. There was plenty of gas left, but it wouldn't do for him to simply follow this road forever. If the SUV broke down on him or a tire was punctured, he'd have a hell of a time getting help or making it out without considerable trouble. The gradient, too, was increasing with every passing mile. This region was hillier than he was used to, and the mere thought of trekking up and down muddy hills in the event of an emergency made him feel exhausted. His cell phone's reception ranged from spotty to non-existent, which only added to the frustration.

Slowing further and taking stock of his surroundings, he was not a little unnerved by a perceived darkening of the sky above. Whether this effect was produced by the oncoming evening, the rainstorm which seemed poised to rage on without surcease or merely the towering canopies of trees which now flanked the road on both sides with such density as to block out the natural light, he couldn't say. A little further, he thought, licking his lips and narrowing his gaze. His grip on the wheel tightened. If I don't come upon something ahead, then I can just turn around and head back towards the highway. The heater belched forth a bolus of warm air, but it did nothing to squelch the shudder that coursed through him just then. His stomach turned and he grimaced at the wave of bile that antagonized the entrance to his throat.

The road degenerated even further, into a ruddy mix of rocks and dirt that was difficult to drive on. Ulrich would have turned around right then if not for the discovery he made some fifty yards or so from the road. To his left, the woods were thinner, the trees there a good deal younger than was the norm. Nestled within this cluster of hearty saplings he spied a squat, ramshackle building. A cabin, maybe. That the little thing, with its sloping, caved-in roof and warped wooden exterior had been utterly ruined since before he'd even been born did not seem like a stretch. The tenement crouched, looked not unlike a brigand poised to leap out onto the road, such was its degeneracy. But he passed it without incident, only to find its equal in decrepitude half a mile further down the rapidly-degenerating road.

Was this it?

Was this Moonville?

His gut told him it was so. He'd been driving long enough, and if his calculations were correct, he'd been heading more or less in the right direction. He'd probably come upon the ghost town by a lesser-known route, a route devoid of markings, used by locals. He'd been aiming for McArthur, but had somehow stumbled upon the ghost town instead. He knew them to share some roads and byways. The road he now traveled must be one of them, he wagered.

The GPS was of no help in cementing this suspicion, but the presence of these ruined abodes was sufficient evidence for him. He'd made it. In some roundabout fashion, he'd driven straight into the heart of the myth-shadowed ghost town where his investigation was to take place.

And suddenly, he was very sorry for it.

This wasn't the way Ulrich had intended for things to go. He'd imagined his arrival in McArthur going very differently, had pictured a warm reception at the local inn, a bit of banter with some locals, a warm meal. Instead, he'd meandered straight into the heart of things, to a stretch that could not be found on any map.

Gulping, Ulrich shut off the stereo. Somehow, the booming vocal of “Mr. Success” had lost all its charm. Under the circumstances it seemed irreverent, gaudy. And perhaps a little dangerous. He cut his speed yet again, worried that noise from the vehicle might attract attention.

But from who? he wondered, shaking his head.

It was a question better left unanswered. The houses that now entered into his periphery-- if their weather-beaten, rickety carapaces could indeed be termed such-- were undoubtedly empty. The most desperate of squatters would have steered clear of them. But even if they were unpeopled, Ulrich was still careful, apprehensive that he might rouse something less substantial from within their misty depths. To break the remote silence, to interact with his surroundings as anything but a silent spectator, he feared, might serve to upset the balance of things and incite the tottering houses to loose upon him some fraction of their accumulated memories.

What the houses lacked in shape and structure they more than made up for in memories. These houses, like prisoners of war, had seen things in their time. They'd been left to suffer and fester. And written upon their shattered, broken faces was the toll of years. The things that these houses had seen in their steady march to obsolescence, he thought, were better left to simmer in the dense woods where none might disturb them. This sort of scenery was precisely the kind which inspired feelings of fear in men and fueled tales of haunting. He felt rather ashamed now for having made fun of the superstitions of the locals when Jerome had brought the case to him. To see Moonville, to take in its ruination first-hand, was to be touched by something ethereal.

Ulrich was only a few minutes into Moonville and already he wanted to leave.

Chapter 6

Maybe you should turn back.

Maybe you shouldn't have ever taken this case.

These were the thoughts that constantly intruded upon his mind as he attempted to navigate the ghastly scenery.

The road branched off every now and then into less substantial paths but Ulrich was careful to stay on the main drag, lest he further lose his way. There seemed no end to the ruined houses, which sprang up now every quarter mile, and which showed little range in the extent of their dissolution. The rain wasn't letting up, and the shallower pocks in the road were already swollen over with cold rain. A bolus of dread had settled firmly in Ulrich's throat, and the more he drove the less hope there appeared to be of its being unseated by prettier scenery. Illogical though it was, he couldn't even be sure that turning around was an option; though he hadn't veered off of the shabby road that had led him to Moonville off of the highway, he felt somehow certain that he'd meandered too far now into a kind of trap for a mere reversal to be effective. The road was urging him on, and he expected that the path would continue to pull him further. It was like he was inching down the digestive tract of an enormous serpent.

He'd entered its mouth. There was nothing for him to do but wait to come out on the other side.

He dabbed a bit of sweat away from his forehead with a paper napkin and tried to pinpoint just what it was that had him so worked up. He hadn't seen anything too out of place, nothing unexpected or frightening. Dilapidated buildings and trees were not so uncommon, with downtown Toledo hosting no shortage of the former. The rain was hard and made travel a bit more stressful, but he was in a good car, rather than his rickety beater. So, what was the matter, then?

Pursing his lips and tapping the accelerator cautiously as he rounded a slight curve in the road, he decided it was something in the air. This place was not like other deserted or rundown places. Its capacity for dredging up unease ran far deeper than he could articulate. With each broken abode that came into view, Ulrich felt almost as though he were accidentally glimpsing something private, something he wasn't meant to see. In a way, it was like stumbling into a vast, dark funeral home and prying the lids off of coffins to gaze upon those who rested within. The homes, like corpses, were laid bare here, vulnerable, and he didn't like what he saw. It was a menagerie of ruin, a dense forest peppered with relictual evidences of civilized life. The people had gone, though, so very long ago, and only the structures they'd cast off remained as proof. Why had they gone, and why had the homes been left to fester in isolation? There were commonplace explanations for all of this, of course, but in navigating brooding Moonville, Ulrich could not but entertain alternative theories.

The general mood of the place was seeping into him, coloring his perception. This seemed overwhelmingly like the sort of locale where one might venture only to be spirited away suddenly, and without a trace. Without explanation. That was what had happened to Dr. Siegfried Klein, allegedly, and now that he was there himself, Ulrich was beginning to refine his previous hypothesis. He was no longer confident that it'd been a mere misadventure during a hike that'd seen him disappear.

A place like this... it could swallow a man up so that he could never be found.

The gradient continued to steepen. The trees, though they partially masked the rise and fall of the terrain with their shadowy bulk, could be seen to jut out about the edges of the road awkwardly as they erupted from the sides of large, mossy hills. This region, he'd read, was known for its hills and ravines. Giving the SUV some gas, Ulrich climbed to the top of a hill and paused at its apex, glancing nervously at the way ahead. Though he kept his foot half-pressed to the brake, the steep, muddy descent that followed made it difficult for him to maintain control of the hefty vehicle. The SUV slid on its way down, nearly coasting off of the road and into the barrier of trees. It was only thanks to a patch of intact cement that he managed to regain traction and steer the thing to a stop. He could feel his pulse pounding in his palms as he dug his fingers into the wheel. Sweat burst from the pores across his hairline, and a few drops accosted his eyes. Outside, the rain was as furious as ever, with powerful gales knocking sheet after sheet of it into the side of the car. It was like being at sea during a storm, and the vehicle swayed on its suspension every bit as much as a ship might when caught on a wave.

Then, from behind, came a wicked commotion.

The ground shook, and the sound of splintering wood broke through the oppressive cannonade of rain and wind.

A tree had fallen, narrowly missing the back of the car. The partially-rotted trunk smashed into the ground and left a deep rut in the murk. Smaller branches from other trees came raining down in its wake, rapping against the top of the SUV like so many searching claws. In a panic, Ulrich pressed the accelerator and lurched forward. He needed to get to some sort of clearing and wait out the storm. No good would come of lingering here, in the open, where more trees might fall and strike the car. Ahead could be seen the base of a great hill, taller than any he'd yet climbed. The wheels slipped as he picked up speed and the SUV met its first real trial in scaling it. Ulrich kept the thing straight, peering at the rearview as he did so and spying the titan length of the fallen tree through his rain-speckled window.

There could be no turning back on this road now. The way was blocked. The realization brought him to the verge of nausea.

Driving on, Ulrich felt the wheel pulling to the left. He wrenched it to the right in the hopes of keeping things steady and fought his way to the top of the hill. The makeshift road was steadily degrading now, and the mud was sloughing downhill in messy heaps. If he didn't make it to the top, and to McArthur, soon, then he was liable to end up stranded.

With no little cursing, the hill was mounted. And when he was over it, something just beyond, couched within a nest of trees on a narrow drive that branched off to his immediate right, captured his attention. It towered awkwardly amidst the woods, its battered panels soaked by the rain and its Garrison style overhang serving as a startling contrast against the tumbledown shacks he'd hitherto seen. The great double-paned windows stared out like the compound eyes of a furtive insect, and were dappled in a mix of rain and age-accumulated dirt.

It was the Sylvan Infirmary.

The Sick House.

Ulrich gulped as it came into view, promptly parking the SUV and leaning forward in his seat. He cranked up the windshield wipers until they thumped along at full speed and he squinted through the rainfall to get a better look. Further examinations removed any doubt he might've had at first glance. This was the place. In the flesh, so to speak.

Quickly and curiously enough, the storm began to peter out, as though the discovery of the old infirmary were sufficient to call it off. The wind persisted, nudging the SUV as it sat atop the hill, and some few fat drops of rain tumbling down from the overburdened leaves of trees above smacked at its roof noisily. Ulrich felt his chest tighten. The very sight of the old building put a fright in him, though he couldn't for the sake of him say why. Maybe it was the way the windows looked, each of them possessed of an otherworldly darkness and seeming to showcase, in turn, strange, ethereal stirrings indicative of habitation. Maybe it was the way the place had kept its shape, despite being nearly so inundated in ruin as its various neighbors, that gave him the chills. The thing exuded a quiet kind of defiance and would not so easily succumb. Unlike the others, this building might be entered, explored, dwelt in. That was, in fact, what Ulrich was there to do.

If the thought of entering or interacting with those other shanties along the way had given him grounds for unease, then the idea of stepping through the threshold of the infirmary that now glared back at him was sufficient to fuel his nightmares. Those other habitations seemed quaint and impotent by comparison. This building carried itself differently, scarcely seemed like a building at all in certain aspects. Eighty years and more of operation had gifted it no shortage of memories. There was no accounting for all that had occurred within its walls. Perhaps it was merely his imagination working overtime, but Ulrich couldn't but suspect that some secret sins yet festering, hidden, in the dark corridors of the place, were in some way responsible for its profoundly demoniacal cast. Its posture and condition were unlike those of any other building he'd ever run across. It was a blatantly antagonistic thing. That a man should pay it a visit and disappear was not surprising in the least.

Evening had begun to set in with alarming swiftness, rendering the boxy frame of the Sylvan Infirmary in rough hues of shadow. His arrival at this site seemed nothing short of providential. Mere instinct had led him onto that unnamed road off of the highway, and that lonesome stretch had brought him here, to the very threshold of the Sick House. It was like he'd been called, lured. That the occasion was owed solely to coincidence never crossed his mind.

Hesitating for a long while in the SUV, Ulrich eventually shut off the engine and listened to the last of the rain as it died away against the exterior of the car. The heavy trees were disturbed by a strong gale, and a shower of loosened limbs rained down upon the ground from all around him. Reaching for his cup of coffee, he raised it to his lips and sucked in a a great mouthful, only to find it unpalatably cold. Frowning, he swallowed it, shivering as the chill brew wormed its way down his esophagus and dropped into his stomach with an almost audible splash. The air in the vehicle was stuffy; not so long ago he'd been comfortable, would have raved about the excellent climate control system. No longer. Now he found himself tugging at the collar of his shirt, his scalp itching and his lungs burning for fresh air.

When the rain had fully stopped, Ulrich grit his teeth and opened the door, stepping out. With his first step the muddy ground grasped at his leather boots firmly. It was only by holding onto the outside of the car that he managed to pry himself free and waddle off of the main road towards the narrow byroad that led to the infirmary. He locked up the car, its security system activating with a shrill chirp which was, in that moment, appallingly discordant. He wasn't even sure why he'd bothered to lock it; there was no one around for miles.

No one he could see, anyway.

Somehow he felt confident that there were no other humans in the vicinity, though if pressed he could not claim to truly feel alone as he stood outside the SUV. There was something out there that gave him pause, made him reconsider the feelings of overwhelming isolation that should have plagued him right then. The remoteness was broken up by some other presence, its provenance scarcely perceptible. The house, maybe, was watching him. But was that even possible? Could houses, being inanimate things, possibly watch someone? If not for the plague that fell over his senses then, he might have thought it a silly notion.

The Sylvan Infirmary looked just like it had in the photographs, though seeing it in person only seemed to add a new and horrific dimension of realism to its features. That college students should make the trip out here to explore the place made no sense to him; he was being paid handsomely to investigate some goings on surrounding the old building and he wanted nothing more than to flee. He took a few unsteady paces forward and stopped in the sodden grass, looking up at the two-story structure with a mixture of awe and nausea. Something creaked from nearby; it may have been the groaning limb of a tree or some unfastened panel in the old building that did it, but the effect was fearful, and he instinctively braced himself.

He'd approached the building from an angle. Its front entrance could not be seen from this spot, meaning he would have to do a bit of walking about the grounds before he could enter. It wasn't at all what he wanted to do; driving to McArthur and waiting for a sunnier day to begin his investigation of the place was a far more pleasant idea.

Nonetheless, he went on.

Exploring the infirmary now only made sense. The townspeople of McArthur didn't know he was coming just yet. If any of them had had anything to do with the disappearance of Dr. Klein-- and it was certainly possible that someone in the sleepy town indeed did-- then he owed it to himself to check things out now, before they had a chance to come out to the building and hide whatever evidence they might've left, or which the police might've overlooked.

More than this, however, the investigator felt compelled. Something, despite all of the nebulous terror he felt, was egging him on. There was an uncomfortable warmth in his stomach which spread gradually through his limbs like dull fire. Pressing on, he felt, was the only way it might be quelled. He recognized in this sensation no shortage of curiosity; curiosity intermingled with raw fear.

The first thing he noticed as he came within twenty feet of it was the way it seemed to cast an unnatural shadow about its surroundings. Though the infirmary was surrounded by countless trees of variable height and thickness, the bulk of the darkness came unquestionably from its own form, and the general impression was one of spoilage, as though the rain had washed filth of a kind from the ancient building and subsequently poisoned the land with a dark blight. Ulrich's boots sank into the mud as he fought his way off of the road and into the tall grass. In spots, the grass was up to his hips, and the wide, unnatural-looking fronds that sometimes sprang up along the way were dripping in cold rain that soaked into him. Shivering, Ulrich went on as quickly as he could, pushing up onto the property from the side before rounding a corner and leaving the SUV behind. From where he now stood the road was no longer visible, the sight blocked out by a particularly dense cluster of trees. However, the back of the building was presently in view and he ambled by, looking up and down its length for anything out of the ordinary, anything but the loathsome degeneration with which he'd already become well-acquainted. There were windows here, all of them intact. Opaque, filled with shadow so that they were bordering on black, it was a marvel to him that none had been broken over the years by ballsy college students.

Ulrich flinched as he came upon something in the grass. It was a dead bird, its dark brown wings stretched out and vaguely twisted. To which species it belonged or how it'd met its end, he was unsure. Grimacing, Ulrich stepped over it and continued on, peering up guardedly at the exterior of the building. There was a single door in the rear of the house, still some paces ahead, through which he might gain access. The exterior was pockmarked in several places with perfectly circular openings the size of a silver dollar. These holes, which appeared every ten or so feet in seemingly random positions, had probably been made by carpenter bees during the summer. Above him, he heard a groaning and tapping, as of metal scraping wood. A loosened gutter converted mainly into rust swayed in the breeze and grazed the second story.

Ulrich very nearly stepped on a pair of dead birds, their bodies bloated with rot and rain. They'd apparently fallen in the same place, had died in the same fashion as the last one, and were of the same dark brown coloration. He sidestepped them, only to narrowly miss a mound of plumage half-obscured by tall grass. More dead birds, three or four of them here, and only a few feet from where the last two had been. Marching a few steps further, he discovered several more. All told, there must have been twenty or thirty scattered across the back of the property.

Then, when the back door was coming into view, he saw it.

A single bird, with dark brown plumage, dove out of a neighboring tree, sailed quickly through the air and slammed headlong into the back of the building. Its tiny body crumpled at once and fell, twitching, to the grass. Ulrich was spooked by this, shambled over awkwardly to the bird's resting place, only to find it in a similar state to the others, its body contracting spasmodically in its death throes. “Jesus,” he muttered, looking up to the building and then to the canopy overhead as though expecting more birds to attempt a kamikaze. Was something drawing them in? Throwing off their navigation, perhaps? He pursed his lips and looked out to the dark woods about him, at the crest of a far-off hill that was partly visible between the crowded trees that exploded for miles behind the infirmary.

He was one of those birds. His navigational system had been disrupted. He'd been drawn to the building, despite his aversion. If he wasn't careful, he would join those birds as a casualty. That the infirmary could break him, too, was never in doubt.

He'd arrived within reach of the back door. It was a wooden thing, meaty, on ragged steel hinges, and looked every bit as battered as the rest of the place. A broken lightbulb was positioned just above it, the glass vessel that'd once encased it thoroughly shattered and thick with dewy spider's silk. Ulrich sucked in a deep breath as he reached out to touch the door. The grooves in the wood, slick with rain, had about them a softness and coolness that was not unlike cold skin, and he recoiled at once. Peering down at the door handle, he found it locked with a padlock. The brand name was effaced by rust, but the mechanism looked largely intact. Slowly, he reached out and jostled it. It proved as hearty as it looked and would not budge. He considered strong-arming his way in, but thought better of it when a second bird descended from the canopy and slammed into one of the upper story windows right above him. Its body sailed to the ground and crashed into the tall grass, where it disappeared in a series of flutters. It would be best not to do anything brash...

Heart pounding, Ulrich took a few steps back and continued round the other side. The front door, or a side door, perhaps, would be open. He wouldn't attempt to break into the place unless absolutely necessary. Later on, if he couldn't make his way in, a cop could likely assist him. It would be safer that way, too. More and more he reconsidered his course of action and began to plan a retreat. He'd come back with more men, more resources, on a brighter day. That would be the sensible thing to do, said the cowardly voice in the back of his head.

More dead birds marked the way forward, and it wasn't until he rounded a corner and arrived on the shadow-swollen side of the house, wreathed in wild trees, that the avian carnage ceased. Here there were no windows or doors, merely two stories of wood paneling and a chimney whose structural integrity was questionable at best. A few bricks had fallen from the stack and were buried in the yard. He nudged one of them with his foot, and noticed that its ruddy edges had begun to crumble.

Disheartened at the lack of a side door, Ulrich soldiered on, the tops of his boots dappled in thick knots of mud. To his side, clinging to one of the rain-soaked wooden panels, was a curious-looking insect, a fly of some kind with disproportionately long limbs. Its tiny eyes were focused on him as he passed, its thin body and membranous wings twitching ever so slightly with the passage of the breeze. He didn't care for the sight of it. In fact, he found it utterly disgusting, representative, perhaps, of the oddities a further exploration of the site might yield. Beads of cold rain struck him from above, rolling off of the tree tops in fat globules. His shoulders, his neck, his face, were all dampened before he managed to round the next corner and survey the front of the infirmary. His woolen coat could not altogether protect him from the weather, and though he pulled the collar closed, the cold still pressed against him like an unwelcome stranger.

The front of the building was presently in view.

The scene there could not have been more grotesquely picturesque. It called to mind Poe's House of Usher or something equally sinister. The swaying of a loose wooden panel in the harsh wind served as a kind of salutation to the investigator and all but cemented in his mind that this old building was not so feebly inanimate as it might have seemed to an ignorant observer. It was a living, breathing thing, insofar as it appeared to have thoughts and an agenda of its own. To step through its front door, which was similarly constructed to the one in the rear and, unsettlingly, ajar, was to deliver one's self into the mouth of an enormous beast. Even without the common perils associated with old and decrepit buildings such as this, there could be no denying that to enter it would be to put himself in great danger, such was its malicious appearance. Nothing good could possibly dwell within. It was a place long abandoned by pleasantry, used only to nurturing decay and foisting such on all who were foolish enough to venture inside. The door creaked on its hinges, the lock that'd kept it shut laying on a stoop of discolored concrete. Glancing upward and burying his hands in his pockets in search of warmth, Ulrich studied the three rows of windows that looked out upon the overgrown field where he stood. The dim outer light could not penetrate them.

Surveying the field, Ulrich spotted a tottering wooden sign. The paint had long been washed away, but with a bit of effort the carved message on it could still be read. He walked up to it and squatted down until it was at eye-level. SYLVAN INFIRMARY EST. 1875

He took in a deep breath through his mouth, leaving his throat icy, and then looked back at the building. The door eased open a bit further, as though inviting him. A light rain began to fall, sending the sea of green about him rippling. Springy leaves and blades of grass all quivered in the fresh rain, and before he gave himself a chance to second-guess it, Ulrich marched towards the entrance. A sound erupted from up in the canopy, a sound which he hadn't heard since leaving the SUV. A cacophony of squawking birds. What message were they seeking to convey? He gulped as he heard their cries ring out, his advance slowing, if only temporarily.

Perhaps they were trying to warn him off.

Maybe they were reciting his last rites.

Standing at the threshold, the rain now falling harder and seeming to urge him in with haste, Ulrich looked inside. The grey light did not penetrate far, elucidating only a few feet's worth of raw, wooden flooring. The remainder of the room was eaten up by shadow, and he flinched at the thought of entering, lest he, too, should be consumed by it. From his pocket he drew out his cellphone, and by some clumsy combination he switched on the flashlight function. Raising it up, he took another step, his muddy heel landing on a squealing floorboard, and held his breath.

Then, he followed through with his other foot.

There, he thought. You're inside now. That wasn't so bad, was it? He stood just inside the door for a few moments, blinking vacantly at his dark surroundings and sucking in lungfuls of the still, rarified air. It tasted of antiquity. Though shabby, the building did well to stifle the sound of the rain outside, which was now falling once more with gusto.

He was about to continue on when a sudden noise rang out and shortened his nerve.

From above came a familiar thud.

Turning slowly, Ulrich glanced through the half-open door at his back, just in time to see the body of a brownish bird sailing to the ground.

Chapter 7

The light jumped around, though he did his best to keep it steady. Canvassing his surroundings, Ulrich built a bit of distance from the door and, when he was sure the floor beneath his feet was sound, ventured deep into the spacious entry room. It'd probably been a lobby, once, though to look at it now one had to use no little imagination to picture it as such. Broken furniture cluttered the far corners; chairs, small tables, all of them broken either intentionally or degraded through decades of disuse.

Though he was alone, Ulrich could not exorcise the feeling that he was being watched. A careful search of the room, which proved it empty of any presence, should have put his mind at ease, but in fact the effect it had on him was quite the opposite. He scanned the plaster ceiling above him, tracing the wandering cracks with his light. He squinted into every pile of broken furniture, sure that no human agency dwelt there. With every passing moment, however, he sensed more and more the weight of strange eyes. Despite the cold, he felt his hand grow sweaty as it gripped the phone. Licking pensively at his lips, Ulrich peered to his sides, where the main room evidently branched off into two directions. The way to each of the adjoining rooms was blocked by doors of similar manufacture; they were built of a soft-looking metal, flecked in rust and thoroughly dented. Small windows of dense glass sat at the top of them, and would have given an opaque view of the rooms beyond if not for the pervasive darkness. Ulrich wasn't ready yet to move on, wished to explore this first chamber and steel his nerves before continuing, and so turned his attentions to the walls.

In two spots, a long, almost tarry trail of mold seeped from the ceiling. Age-old water damage, presumably. The dark, speckled rings on the ceiling from whence these black trails sprang reminded him of the water stain on the ceiling of his own office. He raised one of his arms and blocked out his nose and mouth with the damp sleeve of his coat. It was an impotent defense, but was better than willingly breathing in whatever spores this hateful building might have fostered. At least, he hoped so. I don't know what kind of mold that is, but it better not be the deadly kind. He tensed, searching the walls for anything more of interest. Pocks and gashes in the plaster were frequent. In these nooks were mounds of accumulated dust. Spiders had made their homes in others. Gossamer threads lined the stretches of wall that were untainted by mold like Christmas garlands.

Tangled up in a cluster of broken furniture was a bit of yellow caution tape. Compared to everything else in view, it appeared new, vibrant. Ulrich grit his teeth and wondered what it was doing there. He knew the Sick House had been investigated after the disappearance of Dr. Klein by the State Highway Patrol, but the presence of this tape made him wonder whether he was supposed to be there at all. The front door had been open, the tape removed from the entry, and he hadn't so much as given the police station a ring to let them know that he was in town. In the best case, he'd look like an over-eager amateur if found there by the authorities. In the worst case, he'd spend a night in jail for trespassing.

But why had the door been open, and why had the tape been cast aside? Had someone broken into the place before him? For what reason?

Ulrich felt a twinge of stiffness dash across his broad shoulders. He stopped dead in his tracks, his perception of another presence in the building redoubling and pressing down on him as though it were a load of stones strapped to his back. Had someone else beat him to the punch? Had the perpetrator, the one responsible for luring Dr. Klein here in the first place, been by to clean up whatever evidence had been left behind? If so, were they still in the infirmary, watching him from some unseen vantage point? These and other questions assailed his mind, heaping yet more unease onto his loaded shoulders. Suddenly, the sounds of his muffled breathing against his coat sleeve seemed ludicrously loud. Grey hairs on the back of his neck began to stand on end like the feelers of an insect, attempting to zero in on the threat that he was certain must loom very close now. He was a sitting duck, would be attacked at any moment--

But nothing came. No death blow, no sucker-punch. Nothing. Ulrich stood in place, hyperventilating in the dusty air and shuddering. When a few moments had passed, he raised the light afresh and began once more to take stock of the room around him. Nothing of substance had changed, nothing had moved, but somehow the positioning of the shadows appeared different to him. It was only after a lengthy study of each corner, and then a second, that he felt sure that he was alone in the room.

That was not to say, however, that someone did not wait for him in one of the adjacent chambers, yet unexplored.

After some hesitation, Ulrich decided to start through the door on the right. It was stubborn, and his initial cautious attempts to wrench it open were met with frustration. In order to pull the metal door open, Ulrich found it necessary to use both hands. He set his phone down gingerly on the floor and then grunted as the door popped and groaned. The dented sheet metal loosed a queer pop as some component grated unnaturally against another. When it was half-way open and showed no signs of closing on its own, Ulrich snatched up his phone, wiped his shaky hands frantically against the front of his coat and then peered inside timidly.

Something inside the room bolted as his light illuminated the space. Ulrich pressed his back to the metallic doorframe, his heart in his throat, only relaxing when the commotion ceased and he had some time to attribute the noise to vermin. A rat. Maybe a cat or dog. Standing upright and taking another step into the room, he held out the light and explored its dimensions.

It was not a room at all, however, but a short hallway. The ceiling here bulged very slightly, as though bloated. The way the light green paint was fragmented and worn away from the ceiling, the way that the floorboards directly beneath the spot in question sagged for the dripping of water from above, indicated a serious leak. He proceeded with great caution, one of his hands up against the dirty wall and his eyes darting between the ceiling and floor as though expecting one to suddenly give way as he advanced. Ulrich passed over the soggy, sagging floorboards and avoided a trickle of water that emerged from the watery boil that bloomed across the ceiling. When past this, he arrived at the threshold to another room which, in the scant light, he recognized as a kitchen.

A pair of rusted sink basins sagged against the walls, the pipes that'd once fed them now escaping from the cracking plaster and hanging limply like ruddy tree branches. There was a good deal of litter to be found across the floor, much of which came in the form of discarded newspaper. How it was that this paper had not broken down in such wet conditions was a mystery to him, however large swaths of the floor appeared covered in shreds of it. There were other things, too, which threw off light when brought under the scrutiny of his glowing phone. Shards of glass, broken bits of what had probably once been ceramic dishes, were scattered about amidst the paper, their outlines veiled in thick layers of dust. Upon entering this room he'd been struck by the smell of moisture; the wetness here was more profound than it'd been at the entrance, though from where it came specifically he could not say. A chill breeze carried the sour, earthy smell to his nostrils, presumably a draft creeping in from behind the walls where the plaster had crumbled.

It was hard to believe that anyone had ever prepared food here. A wooden table, split into two pieces, sat near the room's center like a piece of modern art, giving no indication of what had left it in such a state. He stepped on something hard and wooden, the handle to some cooking instrument, and then witnessed some furtive rustling beneath a mound of paper near his other foot. He was quick to spring away, the floor groaning as he did so and a pair of large, round insects dashing to one of the corners as fast as their many legs could take them.

Ulrich wasn't fond of insects. His jobs sometimes took him to seedy motels whose reputations for illicit activities were second only to their reputations for perennial infestations, and encountering bugs had always made him squeamish. Once, when spying on a man on behalf of his suspicious wife-- a job that'd paid a pittance and had only been worthwhile due to its simplicity-- a fat cockroach had dropped down onto the back of his jacket, and he hadn't noticed till he returned to his apartment and took the garment off. The little monstrosity had hitched a ride, giving no indication of its presence until he spotted it darting across his living room carpet. He hadn't slept that whole night, had dedicated himself to capturing the thing and subsequently spending what little he'd made on the case in thoroughly fumigating his apartment, just in case there'd been some other hangers-on.

The area near the sinks had been done up with tile flooring. Those few porcelain tiles that were not broken were so awfully soiled that their designs were impossible to glean. He could tell only that the tiles had once been a whitish color, and that they'd covered nearly half of the room. Ulrich spent a bit of time scanning these with his light, cautiously tapping away small mounds of garbage with the toe of his boot.

It was quickly becoming clear that evidence would be hard to come by in this place. Short of sifting through the contents of the building with a sieve, he was unlikely to stumble upon anything of significance to the case. If his eyes were right, then the kitchen broke off into a narrow hall which was fronted by a short flight of stairs. What lay beyond them remained a mystery. Maybe he'd find something more compelling there.

While further canvassing the mess at his feet, Ulrich heard a sound that immediately saw him stagger three steps back. His heart thrashed violently in protest while one of the stairs ahead was heard to groan with a ponderous weight. His hand shot up reflexively, bringing to light the far side of the room, but from his current position there was no good view of the three or four stairs that led from the kitchen.

What he did see, a mere flicker in the light of his screen, was an impression of pale, white flesh.

An intruder?

A limb, perhaps a hand, had been glimpsed at that very moment when he'd deigned to raise his light source, and it had vanished just as quickly. The owner of that porcelain-colored limb could be heard to flee up the stairs and into some yet unexplored portion of the building precipitously. The air around him was disturbed by the pounding of heavy footfalls. The slapping sound of the soles meeting the floor seemed to indicate that the intruder, whoever it was, fled barefoot.

Ulrich's muscles seized awfully, leaving him anchored in place and shaking. He fought to brace his arms, to take up some kind of awkward defensive stance while also keeping his phone poised ahead of him. Should the individual race back down towards him, he didn't want to be caught unaware. The light danced around, illuminating the foot of those few sagging stairs. Though he focused on that spot where the figure had been but a moment ago, he found himself overwhelmed by a desire to continue scanning the kitchen around him, lest something else should materialize in the shadow and approach him from behind.

Ulrich was no fighter. He'd had his share of brawls as a kid, had crossed fists with a few drunkards in his university days, but he was far from a trained fighter. Combat was not so uncommon in his line of work, except that in most of his investigations, as in many other situations, would-be brawlers were dissuaded from aggressions by his imposing size. Though thin and lean, Ulrich was a tall man by any standard, with broad shoulders and long arms that provided him great reach. Unpracticed punches from those arms of his could build up a great deal of momentum and wreak havoc if they connected, and more often than not his opponents would opt to work things out verbally, rather than risk a stiff right to the top of the head. The investigator was not particularly confident in his abilities, however, and whenever a physical danger presented itself, he found himself running on sheer instinct.

He couldn't think, his mind dominated by the pounding of his heart and his eyes wide with apprehension. With one fist balled, he held it out in front of him and hoped it might be sufficient to ward off whoever—or whatever-- lurked ahead.

Someone had been there with him, he was sure of it now. His suspicion had been correct all along; someone had been watching him from the minute he'd walked in. Before that, even. He'd sensed the eyes of an onlooker before he'd even left the driver's seat. But who could it be? What were they doing all alone in such an awful place as this? Surely it wasn't a lone college student or local seeking thrills? More likely, he thought, gritting his teeth, it was someone associated with the disappearance of Dr. Klein, returned to the site to clear up some evidence that'd been left behind in the plot that'd led to his disappearance. Deciding this to be the likeliest possibility, Ulrich steeled himself, took in a deep breath, and bellowed in a loud voice. “I've seen you. Come out of there with your hands up.” It was all he could do to keep his voice from catching in his throat. If the intruder did come out as per his command, then he had no idea what he'd do from there. He didn't carry a weapon and wasn't much used to apprehending perpetrators.

There was only one thing he couldn't account for, and that was the utter paleness of the intruder's skin. Though he'd glimpsed the individual only a moment, he was certain as he was of anything that they possessed skin so fair as to be unnatural. It was the skin of someone who had never seen the sun, the skin of someone, perhaps, accustomed to lurking in the darkness.

His spine began to tingle, cold sweat wreathing his collar. He narrowed his gaze and focused on what he'd just seen. Could he be so sure that it'd been a human limb darting by? Shuddering, he assured himself it was so. To consider anything else was simply too grotesque and implausible.

“Show yourself or I'll call the police straight away!” he called, his voice a bit frailer this time. He carefully peered at his screen, noticing with a groan that he had no reception in this old building. There'd be no hope of his calling anyone from here, and it made his stomach churn. Sighing, he took a step forward. “I-I'd hate to have to rough you up!” he said, not a little unconvincingly. His knees were practically knocking together, and his eyes scanned the floor for some implement he might use as a makeshift weapon. None presented itself.

The house was still, silent. The intruder could not be heard to stir, had probably taken shelter in some dark corner where an ambush could be staged. Ulrich did his best to calm his heart, lest its pounding drown out any obvious signs of his opponent's return, but even as his pulse quieted down, he couldn't make out anything in the way of noise. The infirmary was silent as a crypt, and the air had become stiflingly still once again.

Staggering forward, he stood at the foot of the stairs and looked upward, flinching as he did so. “Don't say I d-didn't warn you!”

There was no one there. Four steps led up to a small landing from which a more substantial stairwell began towards the upper level. Shaken, Ulrich hesitated and then bounded up those four steps, turning quickly around the corner and expecting his assailant to lash out from the stairwell.

The stairwell was empty however, the space replete with a stuffy darkness. The stairs groaned terribly, the boards flexing beneath his feet and making him reach for the wall for fear that they might give out. There'd been a handrail once, but it survived only in fragments, which were tethered to the wall tenuously by loose bolts. Whether the staircase could bear his weight remained to be seen. His opponent, who'd bounded up it in a furious hurry, seemed to have done so without incident.

Ulrich's stomach turned. Carefully studying the stairs, he brought his light within inches of the nearest few and found that the dust on each board was completely undisturbed. If someone had run up the stairs just moments ago, as he'd witnessed, then they'd done so in a way that he could not fathom. There were no footprints, no indications that anyone had just tread there despite his knowledge to the contrary. This knowledge poisoned his mind with a harsher fear than he'd yet encountered, and he was some moments in composing himself, biting down on his chapped lower lip and quivering like gelatin. Cautiously mounting the stairs after a time, Ulrich continued his perusal, studying each one for signs of the bare feet he'd heard stomping away from him just moments before.

There were none.

It was as though the intruder had turned the corner onto the landing and then slipped away though the wall, or evaporated into nothingness.

But that wasn't possible, was it?

Not unless he was willing to place credence in those dread fancies he'd begun to entertain since entering the Sick House; in those notions of grinning specters and horrors unnamable that Jerome had mentioned. The locals thought the Sick House a haunted place, crammed with nightmares. Surely that wasn't really the case? Ulrich knew better than to fall into such lines of thought, though under the circumstances, ideas of the paranormal were proving ever more convincing to him.

Every passing moment, every step coated in perfectly undisturbed dust, served to solidify the reality of such preternatural things in his mind. At that moment Ulrich would have been open to the existence of a great and many things that he would have been all too happy to deny on any other day of his life, such was the fear that embraced his mind.

Beside himself now with terror and doubting his own senses, Ulrich loosed a nervous little laugh. He braced himself against the wall half-way up the stairs and turned his gaze upward to the pitch-black darkness of the second story. The back of his neck was tingling and his hand was going numb from gripping the edges of his phone. Switching hands, he gradually continued his climb, but not before uttering a few curses under his breath. He wasn't being paid enough for this; the mold he'd seen earlier, maybe, had entered his system and was now inducing hallucinations. That had to be it. He'd read an article not so long ago that certain species of mold had been found to produce spores that, when inhaled, caused humans to hallucinate. The runny, tarry mold caused by water damage in the downstairs was likely of just that sort. When this investigation was through he'd see a doctor, would pursue whatever treatment was necessary to avoid any long-term damage.

And he'd be sure to stick that asshole Jerome with the bill.

In the next moment, Ulrich was forced to wonder just how it was possible, then, that a hallucination could interact with him as though it were real. Pleased with the notion that the intruder had been merely a combination of visual and auditory hallucinations induced by mold toxicity, the investigator found his nerves soothed and continued up the stairs with newfound strength.

Imagine, then, his surprise when it was all sapped away forthwith the moment he reached the top of the stairwell and elucidated the edge of the long upstairs hallway that now opened before him.

There shouldn't have been anything, or anyone, of note in the hallway, but upon his arrival Ulrich tracked something just a few feet away. It flickered as it was caught in the glow of his light, and suddenly sprang towards him from a crouched position.

It was, as best as he could describe it in that instant, a person. An inadequate description, but the only one he could furnish under the circumstances.

Full-fledged personhood was likely too great an honor to bestow upon the sickly, ghastly figure that sprang out at him from the side, grasping his arm and then vanishing in the next instant into a cloud of something like dust just as Ulrich dropped his phone down the stairs. It was a gruesome facsimile of humanity, boasting skin of brilliant, ghostly whiteness and sparse, discolored hair that gave an impression of serious disease. The encounter lasted only a moment; he blinked, gasped, and it was gone.

In that brief instant he'd noted a few firm details; though its face had been obscured, its wrinkled, sagging body had looked more or less human. A long, bony arm with vein-ridden hands gave it the look of something ancient. The whitish hair that erupted from the top of its head was sparse, and there were scabrous spots where locks had been forcibly torn from the scalp. Illness and suffering were called to mind by the frail being, and coupled with the shock of the ambush came a sense of intense disgust, like he'd just been groped by something diseased.

One moment, it'd been there. The next, it'd gone.

How was it possible? No human or animal that he knew of was capable of fleeing that quickly. No creature he knew of was able to vanish into thin air like a mist.

There was only one possibility, only one way for him to describe the thing that'd accosted him, but his turbid mind wouldn't allow it. A lifetime of skepticism burst to the fore, trying to combat the flood of terror that pulsed through his brain and infused his nervous system with all the energy it might need to stage his own flight.

A ghost. That's what it had been. A goddamned ghost. But ghosts didn't exist, did they?

Ulrich didn't stand there to speculate.

When his phone was thrust from his hand, loosened by the sudden, frigid grasp of the dreadful specter, his surroundings were plunged into a frightful darkness that he feared he might never emerge from. It was nothing to be proud of, but when the initial shock had run its course, Ulrich loosed a series of yelps and staged as speedy a retreat as was possible.

All but leaping down the stairs, the investigator clumsily navigated the pitch darkness, tripping and burying one of his knees in the wall. Bits of plaster fell away onto the stairs as a result, interfering with his traction as he continued. Ulrich began to tumble, catching himself only narrowly and reaching the landing with such a thud that the boards beneath his feet were heard to crack. Dropping to his knees, one of which was too sore to support his full weight, he sought out his phone on the floor with wide, blind swipes. The flashlight had gone off, though he was relieved to find that the screen still functioned when finally he recovered it. Murmuring, he tapped frenziedly at the screen until the flashlight came on, and then, without looking back, darted through the kitchen, through the short hall, through the stubborn metal door he'd managed to open and, finally, into the front room. The door to the infirmary was still open, and outside the rain was coming down in sheets. Day had fled and dim evening was seated firmly in its place.

It didn't matter. Without hesitation Ulrich raced out into the early evening, the field rendered in growing darkness and only the faintest vestige of the sun still visible above the imposing line of trees. His boots were caught up in the mud, and he fell into one of countless puddles that now teemed throughout the field. Icy water soaked into his slacks, covered his jacket, splashed his face. Clawing his way up, Ulrich gasped and sputtered, running back the way he'd come.

He ran past the dark side of the building, then the rear, where the swollen bodies of brown birds were trampled underfoot and still others floated in over-gorged puddles as though in leisure. The investigator fell no less than three times, the mud sucking one of his boots off of his foot and sending him to the ground, hard. He felt himself on the verge of a breakdown, thrusting his hands into the mud in search of his missing footwear.

When finally he made it back onto the road, which was so hideously sodden that it could scarcely be called such, he fought his way into the SUV. Neglecting to shut off the alarm, he used the key and jumped into he driver's seat, the security system blaring over the rain and the distant sounds of thunder. He slumped in his seat, slamming the key into the ignition as hard as he could, and taking only a moment to gasp for breath.

As soon as he was able he wiped the mud and rain from his eyes and punched the accelerator. The SUV made a terrible noise as the tires dug into the mud. For a moment he feared it wouldn't budge, that the mud had become too thick and the vehicle had been stranded. Subsequent efforts to advance proved fruitful however, and before long Ulrich was coasting recklessly down the other side of the hill that had brought him to the Sylvan Infirmary, hydroplaning down a waterlogged street that led him he knew not where.

His body ached, he could scarcely see for the rain that slammed the windows and his heart refused to slow down. His lungs were burning so that it was hard to breathe and the only thing he could manage was to stomp on the accelerator, putting as much distance as was possible between himself and the accursed Sick House.

The tingling on his arm where the thing in the house had gripped his wrist had not subsided. Despite the passage of some several minutes and his intense focus on staging an escape, his flesh felt sore, tampered with in a peculiar way. Still hyperventilating, he drew up the mud-slick sleeve of his coat and discovered, on the pale swath of skin just above his wrist, a perfect impression of a handprint. It was captured there in dark hues like a serious bruise or burn, and each of the thin fingers were distinct against the milk-colored canvas of his flesh as he blanched.

Surely the thing hadn't grabbed him that hard, had it? And, for that matter, it had been a hallucination, right? No hallucination could actually mark his body in this way. He rubbed at it softly, his gaze darting between the road and the mark on his arm. He recoiled as he did so, recalling with entirely too much clarity the thing that'd left it. Before finding himself so marked his harried mind had been in the process of a shambling recovery. He'd begun to revisit his earlier mold hypothesis, was actively seeking explanations which might help his fevered mind to disregard the incident at the top of the stairwell and which, with any luck, would inject into the situation enough reason for him to feel reassured in his own sanity.

The mark on his forearm was not the product of mold. That much was certain. Something corporeal, or at least semi-corporeal-- if such things even existed-- had taken hold of his arm. He'd not only seen it with his own eyes, but had this little memento now to show for it.

Ulrich wished he'd never set foot in the Sick House. To go there alone, without informing anyone of his whereabouts, had been incredibly reckless. He'd put his life on the line and gained nothing for it.

The job, as far as he was concerned, was over with. He'd call Jerome when finally his wits returned and give back his money. No job was worth this sort of risk to mind and body.

He wept when, some minutes later, the muddy road transitioned into one of proper concrete and the rain slackened sufficiently for him to glimpse a sign positioned just off of the shoulder.

WELCOME TO MCARTHUR, OHIO

Chapter 8

Harlan Ulrich looked a pitiable mess when he limped out of the SUV and stood, shivering, in the narrow parking lot in front of the Hotel Acardi. Evening had fully set in now, robbing the sky of any light, save for the vague twinkling of far-off stars, half-hidden behind a haze of clouds. He was in the middle of nowhere and had expected the skies to be clearer. The day's storms had put an end to that, though.

It was a rather small place and could not have boasted more than a dozen rooms in its two-story frame. The Hotel Acardi looked almost like two double-wide trailers stacked atop one another, perhaps a little bigger, and was every bit as run down as one might expect a budget motel to be in the sticks. Covered in metal siding that was more rust than anything, the neon sign above the front door read VACANCY, and flickered with the breeze. Rooms on the upper level could be accessed by rickety-looking fire escapes, which snaked along the exterior and swayed whenever a strong gust of wind came through.

Ulrich dropped his boot onto the ground, still half-filled with cold mud, and shoved his foot into it. Straightening his coat, he batted off some half-dried clods and attempted, in some small way, to make himself look presentable. It was pointless, of course. No last-minute preparations could clear the grime of the day from him. He looked like a tramp and smelled like one, too. No matter the state of the lodging, Ulrich intended to pay for a room in cash and head straight for the shower. When that was done, he'd spend the night in bed, any bed, warming his bones and hoping that his time in the rain hadn't been sufficient to cause pneumonia. Already there was a dull ache blossoming behind his eyes, in his sinuses, in his joints. It was going to to be a long night.

The interior of the SUV was a terrible mess. There were splotches of mud on the front seats, on the dash, all over the floor. The driver's seat was soaked with rain and already a sourness was circulating through the air. The exterior wasn't much better; the tires, rims and sides of the car had seen better days. When the mud he'd kicked up all over the thing finally dried, it was going to look like hell. Jerome probably wouldn't be pleased, but then, there was little he could do about it. Perhaps he'd run it through a car wash before driving it back to Toledo.

There was nothing else in the area. The Hotel Acardi had popped up close to the city limits, and though his researches had led him to believe that this was “downtown” McArthur, things seemed hopelessly barren. There was another building about a half-mile from the road. A gas station or restaurant. Beyond that, he thought, there looked to be a kind of strip mall. Trees filled in the empty spaces. He was getting damn tired of seeing those in such abundance.

Nothing much mattered to him by then. He was drained, mentally and emotionally, and could only muster a base automatism as he shuffled out of the car and prepared to book a room. He'd checked out, his mind dashed by all he'd seen. Maybe by morning he'd feel like himself again, but somehow, he doubted it.

Popping the trunk of the SUV, Ulrich hobbled over and lifted his valise out with a groan. When he'd slammed it shut and locked up the car, he dragged his bag behind him and shoved open the door to the hotel impatiently. The smell of cigarette smoke struck him at once, and a dim yellow light reached his eyes.

The lobby of the Hotel Acardi, a room the size of a large walk-in closet and sectioned off into two halves, was done up in knotted off-white carpeting that was at least as old as Ulrich was. One half of the room, where a black-haired man of perhaps forty-five or fifty years sat smoking and reading a magazine, was made inaccessible by a plexiglass box with a little opening at its center. A chipped-up desk teeming with takeout containers, water bottles and apparent trash was positioned behind this, and the edge was festooned by the clerk's slippered heels.

The waiting area was insubstantial, with only two flimsy folding chairs and a water fountain found there. The water fountain bore a sign which blocked would-be drinkers from the spot. It read OUT OF ORDER, and was rendered in the penmanship, presumably, of some previous decade. Ulrich cleared his throat, stooping to look through the plexiglass enclosure. The clerk, apparently, hadn't noticed his entrance. Or maybe he had, and simply hadn't cared.

Wetting his lips with a sip of water, the clerk set down his magazine and cigarette and looked up at his guest. No smile was given, no salutation. The man's brows were closely knit for a time as he scrutinized Ulrich's unkempt appearance. “How many beds?” he said simply, in an abrasive tone of voice. There was an accent to it, more New York than rural Midwest, but years of smoking had given it the grit of sandpaper.

Ulrich pulled out his wallet, slightly damp from the tumbles he'd taken earlier in the rain, and stifled a shiver. His hair was still dripping with rain and his breathing was labored. “One. Just one bed.” He pulled out a few twenties along with his ID.

“That'll be, uh,” the man hesitated, glancing over the counter and gazing narrowly at the trail of mud Ulrich had tracked in. “Ya know, let's call it a wash at 80. A little extra there for the carpet, you understand.” He chuckled a bit, taking a drag from his cigarette and exhaling as he continued. “And it, uh, seems to me that you could probably use a shower, ain't that right, bud?”

Ulrich said nothing, but took four bills, crumpled them, and then reached through the window, dropping them onto the desk with his ID.

The clerk shook his head, standing up and giving the sagging waistband of his navy sweatpants a forceful tug. They looked well-worn, as though the man had never worn another pair in his life. “Now, no need to get all bent outta shape there, baby.” He took another drag, reducing the cigarette nearly to cinders. “I'ma give you a key and you just get yourself squared away there, eh, princess?”

“What time is check-out?” asked Ulrich stoically, whipping back a sopping lock of grey hair.

The clerk chortled as he rifled around inside his desk. “Not so fast, baby. I'm not that kinda fella, you gotta take it slow with me, you hear? I need your autograph on this here paper.” He pulled a one-page agreement from a stack on his desk. It was stained in coffee, or what Ulrich hoped was coffee. Dropping his cigarette butt into a crowded ashtray, he handed over the keys while simultaneously running Ulrich's ID through a copier. There were two brassy keys fixed to a ring, one large, the other considerably smaller. “That little key there unlocks the gate leading to the sauna. You like to sauna, baby? Looks to me like it'd do you a world of good, a round of sauna. I keep it locked up around back with a bit of fencing. Ya know, just to keep the riff-raff out. Those teenagers, they can't seem to stop sneaking back there when I ain't payin' attention. Caught 'em in there fuckin' like three times already!” He laughed heartily, his paunch quaking and undulating. The T-shirt he wore, stained with some kind of yellow condiment, didn't fit him terribly well and failed to reach the bottom of his gut, which peeked out from the hem like a pale knot of dough.

“Don't say,” replied Ulrich, lifting up his bag and turning around. “Which room is mine?”

“It's number 4,” replied the man, dropping back down into his chair and sighing. “Right around the corner, to the left. It's got a hell of a view,” he said with grandiose gesticulation. “Check-out's at noon, but things are slow now, and if you hang around a little longer than that, I ain't gonna fuss.” He shot a wide, magnanimous grin, his yellow teeth gleaming in the light. They looked like they'd been carved out of pure butter.

Ulrich was eager to warm up and to build some distance between himself and the classy fellow working the desk. With nary a word he stuffed the keyring into his soggy pocket and then marched out with bag in tow, letting the door slam closed behind him. “Room 4,” he muttered, taking a moment to glance around. When he'd gained his bearings, he turned the left corner and began to the rear of the building, where a number of doors with unkempt patios were revealed. Sure enough, his room was the first one in the stretch, right on the corner, and its solitary window would give him a view of the forest which at that moment was at his back. Great, he thought. That's exactly what I want. To stare at more of these damned trees from my room.

He was unsure if there were other tenants on the ground level. The room above his own, number 8, had a lit window, but every other room he'd seen appeared dark, with the curtains drawn. The concrete patio was filthy. Hairline cracks could be seen throughout it, and from these cracks there sprouted tall weeds. Doubtful scurryings entered into his periphery as he fussed over the stubborn key, jamming it into the lock and attempting to give it a turn. It wouldn't go. Squinting at the handle, he gave it a tug and then tried once more to turn the key. It finally gave way with a creak.

The first thing that caught his attention as he switched on the light was the ominous shifting of several small somethings in the far corner, near the rough-looking radiator. He held his breath and leered over at the fixture, which groaned as it fired up. Nothing darted from underneath, but it was precious little comfort. There were bugs in this room. Probably lots of them. The big kind, the kind that could sprint nice and fast, and whose death would involve the sort of exoskeletal crunch that made his stomach retch just thinking about it. Son of a bitch...

The disappointment didn't end there, however. The bed, situated at the center of the room, looked a mess. The starchy, sun-bleached comforter hung half-way off of the bed, revealing musty-looking yellow sheets. One pillow, a series of lumps encased in a yellow pillowcase, headed the thing. There was a clock on the wall across from the bed, but a moment's study was all it took for him to realize it wasn't functioning. A rickety nightstand, whose only burden was a remote control, sat beside the bed. Though there was not a corresponding television for this remote to be found, there did appear to be a space against the wall, opposite the bed, where a TV had once been situated, if the outline in the dust was to be trusted. A closet with a fractured mirror finished out the main room, and a narrow hall led to what Ulrich presumed was the bathroom.

Slowly, and with a deep breath, Ulrich closed the door behind him. To his dismay, the entire door frame creaked and rocked for his effort. The whole doorway might've been felled if only he'd given it a stiff push. He messed with the deadbolt and chain lock for a time, but knew them useless in light of the rickety door frame and ultimately opted to push the nightstand against the door. It was a feeble barrier, but would be better than nothing in this old room that was surely no stranger to thieves.

Ulrich held out hope that the bathroom might prove serviceable, and after some minutes' hesitation, set his bag down on the bed. Walking past the closet and catching his sorry reflection in the busted mirror, he turned the corner and found himself faced with an open doorway. Reaching just inside, he sought out a switch and, upon finding one, gave it a flick. A dim yellow light not unlike the one in the rental office came on, revealing to him the shape of the bathroom.

The floors were a scummy tile. A large drain sat at its center, a possible safeguard against flooding, but was missing its cover. The dense brown grime that lined the opening gave him pause, and he wondered what awful little creatures dwelt inside it. The shower curtain had once been a transparent plastic, but was now cloudy and mildewy. The basin seemed intact, but the fixtures themselves showed signs of rust where they met the wall. There was a toilet, its seat yellowed and its lid covered in a profound layer of dust where offensive messages had been rendered by the fingers of past occupants. The sink was possibly the best-looking thing in the entire hotel room, but upon switching on the tap, Ulrich found it only sputtered water in dribs and drabs, and that the wooden cabinet that held the relatively pristine-looking sink was rotten and wobbly.

“Eighty dollars for this?” Ulrich pursed his lips and shook his head, pacing outside in the hall and wondering if he shouldn't just sleep in the car overnight. If he set out now, he could find directions, visit a truck stop for a shower and make it back to Toledo well before sunrise. It was tempting.

Ultimately, however, he surrendered to the room. His day had been too long, his recent fright too great. He needed rest, and though terribly inadequate, the room would simply have to do. Ulrich couldn't be bothered to seek out new lodging and knew that to do so would be an errand of at least an hour. The room's flaws were numerous, but he put them out of mind. He needed a bed, a shower. Some place to pass the night and make sense of what'd happened to him that day in the infirmary. Room 4 met those criteria, albeit disappointingly.

Ulrich took as warm a shower as the bath would allow, and even ten minutes in, when the hot water began to wane and transition into a cooler spray, he stood beneath the shower head, bending down so that the water might cleanse the entirety of his lanky frame. When he'd scrubbed the grime from his body he stepped out of the shower, batting aside the filthy curtain and narrowly scrutinizing the pilly terrycloth towels that'd been provided. There were a few spots on them that looked like cigarette burns, but they seemed clean enough to use overall.

Toweling off, the investigator looked himself over in the smudged up mirror, noting the redness of his eyes and glimpsing, cringingly, the handprint that'd been left behind on his forearm. He'd mostly forgotten about it till then, had put it forcibly out of his mind so that he might relax in the shower. Without even touching it however he found the spot to ache deeply. He flexed his arm, caressed the dark mark with his fingers, and flinched as though expecting the pain to worsen. It felt like a deep muscle pain, or like some soreness of the bones.

He shuffled out to the main room, rifling around in his bag for a clean change of clothes. When he'd dressed, he tossed the towels into a corner of the room and sat cautiously at the foot of the bed, his gaze wandering throughout the space. Ulrich wasn't a wealthy man, and his job often saw him visiting rundown motels of this sort. Still, this was the first time he'd ever been a guest at one. He shook his head in disbelief, placing a palm against the top of the bed and giving it a little push. The mattress felt harder in some spots than others, and would probably be uncomfortable to sleep on. Then again, if the burning behind his eyes was any indication, he didn't much have a choice but to sleep. He was ready to drop, and the lumpy bed was probably the safest spot for him to do so.

Every time he thought to lay down and put out the light, Ulrich's mind was transported back to the shadowed infirmary, to the disordered and dangerous interior of the place, to that rickety stairwell... to the thing that had reached out and touched him in the upper level and sent him racing out.

Ulrich crossed his legs and kneaded at his eyes. Jerome hadn't said anything about this sort of thing. I mean, he'd begun to allude to... certain stories about the Sick House, but I cut him off. Maybe that was unwise of me... he thought, glancing down at his forearm and giving his wrist a little turn. The handprint was as vivid as ever. Just what was that in there? Was it real? Was it... He chuckled to himself. Just a single visit to that old building and already he was willing to entertain the idea of ghosts. But what did ghosts have to do with his investigation? “Not a damn thing,” he muttered aloud, as if to assure himself. “Jerome sent you here so that you could track down his missing uncle. Dr. Siegfried Klein exists. Ghosts do not. Don't lose the plot and go to pieces here. Whatever happened in that infirmary was strange, no doubt, but it wasn't supernatural. Maybe it was a college student, lurking in there and playing a prank.” He pursed his lips, tracing the shape of the handprint on his arm. “It's probably ink of some kind. It'll wash off eventually.”

As much as he wanted to believe it, he didn't really think it was mere ink, though.

Rocking back and forth on the foot of the bed, he rifled through his bag and drew out his notebook, plucking from between its pages the photograph of Dr. Klein. Ulrich studied it afresh, holding it up before him and standing to pace. The smiling old doctor had a kind face; why anyone should want to harm him was a mystery. It wasn't the investigator's problem anymore, though. He'd already decided to throw in the towel, give up the case. It wasn't often that he broke his contracts, but this time he felt it was warranted. To proceed felt too unsafe. He'd gone in over his head this time, taken on a real doozy. Edgar Hudson back home had been right to pass over the job when Jerome had come knocking. Hudson had seen the danger in it, probably.

Ulrich nibbled at his thumbnail, setting down the photo and pacing the stretch between the bed and closet. “No one would blame you for backing out now. Not after what happened today.” He gulped, running a hand through his damp hair and leaving it a mess. “It's a shame, but you really aren't cut out for this kind of thing. Even Hudson, with his reputation, avoided it. If he didn't think it worth pursuing, or, worse, couldn't get the job done, then what makes you think that you can?”

Ulrich buried his hands in the pockets of his sweats and sighed. No one would blame him if he backed out now, perhaps, but if word spread, he'd be mocked for it. He could see it now, the way Hudson and his associates would laugh at him for being scared off. It wouldn't help his already meager reputation in town if he quit now, that much was certain. He palmed at his forehead, kneading at the individual wrinkles in his brow and fighting off the early pangs of a migraine. “They'll all laugh at you,” he muttered. “Just like they've always done. Just like they've always had reason to do. They'll laugh because you couldn't handle it. Because you gave in to the superstitions and lost your wits.” Usually Ulrich was not one for pride, always willing to take the easy way out and follow the path of least resistance where his work was concerned. It was easier for him to go about his life ignoring what his contemporaries said about him behind his back. It was easier to pick up their scraps, to do the simple, uneventful jobs they themselves were too good for.

Something, though he couldn't say what, made Ulrich want to avoid what was easy in this instance, despite his fears. The more he paced, ruminated, the less he wanted to throw in the towel. He wanted to prove himself, to boost his credibility. The only way to do that would be to stay the course. Back in Toledo, when he'd first familiarized himself with the details of the case, he'd been excited and motivated. He'd been thrilled at having a case worthy of his skills as a private investigator. Throwing in the towel now, at the first sign of resistance, would be to prove all of the naysayers in his life correct. At day's end, Ulrich didn't really care what Edgar Hudson thought of him. But he did care about maintaining some semblance of self-esteem. Giving up would only bruise his ego and serve as proof that he was, in fact, out of his league. “If you give up now, you may as well start cleaning toilets for a living.”

Ulrich returned to the bed and picked up his notebook, searching through his writings for the name of the local historian he'd hoped to contact. It was clear to him that he needed to learn more about the Sick House before he dared set foot there again, and there was probably no one else in town with more knowledge on that subject than historian Martin Tillinghast. The Vinton County Historical Society where his office was located, could be found on Devonshire Road. After breakfast in the morning he would set out there and arrange an interview with the man. Then, perhaps, he could get some answers about the place and separate fact from dreadful fiction.

Pleased with this plan of action and feeling more secure now in the direction of his work, Ulrich readied himself for bed. He brushed his teeth at the sputtering sink and tugged the sleeve of his sweatshirt over his hand, effectively blocking the handprint on his forearm from view. Wonder if Tillinghast has ever seen anything like this before? he thought as he spit into the sink.

Switching off the lights, Ulrich meandered carefully towards the bed, bumping his knees against the side of the mattress. He lowered himself down and felt out the pillow, giving it a hard smack in the hopes that it might be softened. He didn't bother to pull down the covers, and instead slept on top of the bed as it was. He'd dressed more warmly to make up for the lack of covers, and wasn't in any hurry to sleep beneath bedclothes of dubious cleanliness.

After some grumbling and adjustment, the investigator closed his eyes and fought to clear his mind. The events of the day were avoided, as were the suspicions that, from somewhere in the room, he'd heard the stirrings of insect legs against the walls.

Chapter 9

Ulrich awoke at some point in the night. He glanced up at the dark ceiling blankly, blinking for a time. Something had made him stir, but in his grogginess he couldn't recall precisely what'd drawn him out of his deep sleep. He licked at his lips, finding his mouth dry as sand, and slowly eased himself up on his elbows. He couldn't have been asleep more than a few hours, but already a wicked soreness plagued his neck and shoulders. “Goddamn pillow,” he muttered, manhandling the thing and folding it over into a more supportive shape. He laid back and stared once more at the ceiling.

The ceiling was a dim canvas lit up by slivers of moonlight. And in those slivers were showcased fragments of what he could only describe as trees. Long branches swayed in the breeze, their gnarled lengths casting ominous shadows into the room. He wished he could block out the small gaps in the blinds and cut off the spectacle in its entirety. For some reason, the presence of those swaying shapes above his head was distracting, worrisome. The more he watched them shift hither and thither, the less sure he became that they were branches. Possibly, he thought, they were something more odious and less impotent than that.

The breeze came in hard, making the window creak awfully and sending the blinds into a stir. The plastic things could be heard to tap the glass, and they parted somewhat, admitting yet more of the frightful shadow-play. Maybe that'd been the sound that'd awoken him, the blinds rattling. Ulrich gulped, shut his eyes, and did his best to ignore it.

It was too late, however. His thoughts were running away from him.

Already his mind was returning to the Sick House. In fact, as he squeezed his eyes shut and prayed for sleep to return, he wondered if he was still in his room at the Acardi at all. His eyes shot open in search of reassurance, but the shadow-play had intensified in the interim and the doubtful shapes cast onto his ceiling now had only increased in their substance. Something, perhaps a full-fledged trunk, could be seen above, and its image swayed very slightly as the blinds were sent rocking in the draft.

Ulrich was transported back to that house, fancied he could smell the dampness, the accumulated dust and grime of centuries as he laid there. He constantly thrust out his hands to ensure that he wasn't laying on the filthy, crowded floors of the infirmary. His heart began to quake, the thick muscle knocking against his sternum and fighting its way up his throat.

And then he heard it. The sound that had awoken him. It wasn't the rustling of the blinds like he'd initially fancied, but something else, something far more unnerving. He was sure. The final vestige of sleepiness was cleared out of his mind by a jolt of sheer fright.

It was the sound of the door to his room being furtively tried.

***

Ulrich should have stood up, should have assumed some sort of offensive posture, but he was anchored to his bed as though the blood had been drained from him and replaced with cement. He gripped at the starchy comforter beneath him and turned in the direction of the door. The door was highlighted subtly in the shades of night, its outline barely visible from behind his narrowed eyes. It wasn't a sturdy thing; he recalled the way the door frame had wobbled, necessitating his placement of the nightstand in front of it. But would that small piece of furniture be enough to keep out an intruder?

The knob rattled as some alien hand closed around it. He could hear the deadbolt quiver in its socket, some yet unseen entity pressing against the outside of the door and attempting to enter. Whatever was trying to gain access to the room never once seemed to him a human being. It was a cheap motel, no stranger to petty crime, he knew, but the commonest explanation, one of a human thief attempting to steal some valuables, was the least likely scenario to his mind. Perhaps it was the slight tingling he felt in his forearm, where the handprint marred his flesh, that made him suspect something other than a human being dwelt outside. The present trying of the door and the sensation that now accosted his flesh were related phenomena, their simultaneousness bespeaking a horrific kinship.

Whatever had reached out to him in the Sick House was here, and it wanted in. There was absolutely no question in his mind.

Ulrich fought against what felt like increased gravity, sitting up in bed. The air was profoundly cold, colder than he'd remembered it just moments ago. He needed to find some way to defend himself, or to leave the room without being discovered by the thing. But how? He had no weapons and couldn't be sure that the entity would be harmed by acts of physical violence. Whatever it was, it wasn't human. Maybe, it wasn't even a physical presence, but rather a phantom, immune to his attacks. Moreover, the room only offered one route of escape, and that was the door. He could break the window and escape through it, but it was positioned right next to the door and would see him land directly in the intruder's path.

He had precious few options.

Racing out of bed, Ulrich stumbled across the dark room and took a firm hold of the brassy doorknob. He planted his feet and summoned what he could of his voice in a shout. “Leave! Leave me alone!”

From the other side of the door came a voice in reply. “Whoa, there. Calm down, baby. Just me.” It was the voice of the obnoxious motel clerk. The man chuckled, sensing through the door that he'd put quite a scare into Ulrich, and added, “Got somethin' for ya.”

Ulrich exhaled, placing a hand against his chest and feeling the trembling of his heart. After a few moments, he stammered, “Don't you ever knock?” He caught his breath. “All right, just a minute.” Carefully he shoved the nightstand out of the way and opened the door-- only a bit at first-- spotting the outline of the portly clerk in the moonlight.

The man looked up at him, grinning. He had an envelope in hand, and gave a little bob of his head. “Yeah, sorry to bother you and all that. I just remembered I had this sitting in the office. Someone, a lady, dropped it off earlier today and wanted me to give it to ya. You're, uh, Harlan Ulrich, right? She thought you might be stayin' here tonight.”

Ulrich frowned. “That's right.”

The clerk handed over the envelope. “That's for you, baby.” He nodded again, taking a few steps back. “Sorry for the disturbance.” He grinned, looking anything but sorry for scaring the hell out of him. “Sleep well.”

Tonguing at his molars and choking back a string of curses, Ulrich crunched the envelope in his fist and shut the door, throwing the bolt and replacing the nightstand in front of it. He felt out the light switch, putting on the lights and groaning as the room was bathed in a yellow glow. The brightness stabbed at his eyes. Carefully, he paced to the edge of the bed and sat down, blowing into his palm and trying to reinvigorate it with a little warmth. The room had grown much colder. Suddenly, the starchy, questionable bedclothes held some appeal.

He gazed at the envelope in his hand quizzically. Who could have dropped off a letter for him? So far as he knew, no one but Jerome was aware of his coming into town. The clerk had said that a woman had dropped it off earlier in the day. Whoever it'd been, she'd known that he'd planned to stay at the Acardi that night. This, perhaps more than anything the envelope might contain, sent shivers down his spine. Was he being followed? Was someone on his trail, monitoring his movements? Who, and why?

He licked his lips and opened the envelope, finding a folded slip of paper inside. He took to unfolding it, blinking harshly till his eyes grew accustomed to the light and he could read.

Ulrich found there was little to read on the paper, however.

Scrawled hastily, in an uneven hand, was a brief message. He read it under his breath, loosing a shudder as the syllables hung in the air like a mist. It was a warning.

“Stay out of godless Moonville. Go home, while you still can.”

He stared at it a long while. “While I... still can?” Someone, evidently, knew that he was in town, and that he'd been poking around in Moonville. Despite being alone in his room, with the blinds shut, he felt suddenly like he was surrounded. So far, save for the motel clerk, he hadn't met anyone else in McArthur. Except for his encounter in the infirmary, he hadn't had contact with anyone in Moonville, either. What, precisely, was he being warned about? Had someone seen him poking around the Sick House? Were they warning him off because they knew about that terrible thing that lurked there-- the one that'd marked up his arm?

The person who'd left the note had known his name.

This could only mean one thing.

“Jerome,” he muttered. Jerome had probably told someone in town that he'd hired a PI to look into his uncle's disappearance. He'd wished to keep a low profile, to arrive in town quietly and conduct his work under the radar. Odds were good, though, that everyone in McArthur knew exactly who he was now, and what he was doing there. His own client, most likely, had blown his cover.

He ruminated on the note for some time, sticking it between the pages of his notebook and choosing to sit awake. Somehow, it didn't feel safe to close his eyes and sleep.

Ulrich sat up for most of the night, only drifting off when the first signs of daylight began to come in through the blinds.

Chapter 10

Wakefulness stole through him with a jerk. Ulrich sat up in bed, wiping the trail of drool from his chin, and looked to the window, which was outlined in sunlight. The air was stale, so thick and sour that he could practically taste it. He shambled to the bathroom and stood in front of the sink, gargling with a bit of cold water from the tap and splashing his face.

His phone told him it was just before noon.

Sleepily, Ulrich changed out of his pajamas and into a dress shirt and slacks. He could only hope that these clothes, the last of the dressy stuff he'd packed, wouldn't end up like his last outfit. A white button down and khakis went well with his leather boots, once he'd managed to knock most of the dried mud off of them on the patio outside. It was a cool afternoon, perhaps a little warmer than the day before, but still chilly. His jacket was in terrible shape from the previous day's escapades, out of commission. He'd have to do without it.

When fully dressed, he collected his things from the room and stuffed his notebook into his bag, carrying it out to the SUV. In the daylight, with its exterior caked in mud, it looked much sorrier than he remembered. He opened the driver's side door, marveling at the mess within, and took a few minutes to brush dried mud off of the seat. There was nothing for it; he was going to get dirty no matter how long he tried to clean things up. An expensive detailing job, maybe, would get the mess up, though the nooks and crannies impacted with crusty deposits of mud would be impossible to fully clear even for a professional. With a sigh of resignation he hopped into the driver's seat and put the key in the ignition. Car's a mess, but that's what Jerome gets for telling the locals I was coming. He blew my cover. Serves him right. I hope his boss takes this out of his pay.

While letting the car warm up, Ulrich leaned against the steering wheel and thought about how his day might go. As he did so, thoughts of the night prior returned to his mind; thoughts of the warning he'd received in the form of a letter. Looking back on it, it didn't seem real, but a perusal of the notebook he carried and an examination of that selfsame missive was sufficient to convince him of its authenticity.

There was at least one person in town who knew he was poking around in Moonville. But who, and why had they sent the note? Were they just trying to scare him off? Had it been sent by the person responsible for the disappearance of Dr. Klein, in the hopes that Ulrich might leave before happening upon something incriminating? This seemed likely. Ulrich set the message back into the notebook and then pulled into reverse, backing out of the motel parking lot. Perhaps he'd speak to the clerk at the Acardi later on, see if he couldn't recall more about the woman who'd dropped it off. Navigating onto the main drag, he started for the strip mall he'd glimpsed the previous evening, hoping to find some place to enjoy a late breakfast.

The rain of the previous day still lingered in shallow puddles along the sides of the road, but the pavement itself was dry and smooth. Sunlight drifted down in abundance in those areas where trees were few, lending the old town something of brightness. Truthfully, as he continued down the road and took in the scenery, spotting the old, rundown buildings that made up downtown McArthur, he felt the sunlight didn't fit in somehow. The dreariness of the previous day would have suited it much better. Dressed up in sunlight, all of its flaws were brought into the open. None of the buildings seemed especially fond of the light, either, for over the years they'd become spent, wizened things like furtive animals accustomed to dwelling in the obscurity proffered by shadow. The scene looked inauthentic. This wasn't how McArthur was supposed to look. The town had put on a happier face in the sunlight for its most recent tourist, but that it was merely faking it was all too clear.

A mile up the road Ulrich came upon a restaurant called Milo's, a diner. It was as good a place as any, and he pulled into the near-empty lot, parking near the door. Stepping out of the SUV, he was reminded again of the chill and paced towards the entrance with his arms crossed against his chest. It was all he could do to keep warm and ignore the cold he so hated.

The side of the building was painted with a quaint advertisement of that type commonly found on old-timey brick businesses, and was half-effaced by the elements. What it said he couldn't quite make out. Ulrich approached the door, built of dingy glass and covered in fingerprints. It gave with a loud creak, which doubtless everyone in the restaurant could hear. He found himself standing at the front of a small dining room, filled with a mixture of booths and tables. A tall wooden box where a hostess might stand sentry was unattended, and a sign positioned next to it urged diners to seat themselves. The air was warm and the smell of grilled meat made his stomach rumble.

But it was not with these features that his senses were chiefly engaged. From the very first, he was distracted by something else. It was a rather empty place, with only two of its dozen or so tables occupied, and something like three or four staff working in the open kitchen besides. What struck him as odd was the way that, upon his entrance, everyone in the restaurant had stopped to stare at him. One-by-one, every diner and staff member turned, their eyes leveled upon him in a narrow dissection. The effect was decidedly hostile.

Why did they stare? Perhaps they were staring because he looked an outsider. Perhaps, he thought, the whole town was on a lookout for someone of his description and they were united in some unspoken oath to oust him from McArthur. Ulrich gave a little bob of his head, doing his best to disarm what he very rapidly came to regard as enmity in the gazes of the occupants.

A waitress in a white apron motioned towards him. “Sit wherever,” she said, her voice gruff and uninviting.

Ulrich stiffened, almost deciding to leave and seek out another restaurant, but something told him that this was as warm a reception as he could expect at any eatery in town. He meandered to a booth near a window, as far from the other patrons as he could get. He dropped down into his seat, picking one of the paper menus off of the table and appraising it while his stomach growled loudly. The place specialized in generic diner fare, precisely the kinds of foods he most craved, and he started making a mental list of all the things he would order. He hadn't eaten since the previous day, and would need a fair bit to keep him going. When breakfast was through, he planned to pay Professor Tillinghast at the Historical Society a visit.

The waitress came by and set a white ceramic mug on the table. This she proceeded to fill with coffee from a glass carafe, despite his not asking for any. When she was through, she stood expectantly with a pad of paper in hand. All the while the eyes of every other person in the establishment remained fixed on him; the whole place had come to a standstill, with eating and cooking having been suspended on his account. He shrank down a little in his seat under the scrutiny. What, haven't they ever seen an out-of-towner before? Aren't small towns like this one supposed to be hospitable? I mean, if they know who I am, then they know I'm here to do a proper job. I'm not some sightseer. I'm one of the good guys, looking to track down one of their own.

Ulrich looked up at the waitress sheepishly. “I'll have the breakfast platter, along with a cheeseburger and fries,” he said, shifting the paper menu towards the other side of his table. “And an ice water,” he added.

The waitress scribbled this down quickly and then stomped out of sight. Hospitality, apparently, was not her strong suit. From the kitchen Ulrich heard a burst of hushed speech. Just what the staff felt the need to discuss in whispers was hard to say, but Ulrich would have bet his arm that they were talking about how much spit to hide in his ice water. He chanced to peer over the edge of the partition that separated his booth from the next one over, and caught the cook staring conspicuously in his direction. As soon as Ulrich looked over, the man broke eye contact and disappeared around the corner in a flash.

The whole place was making him feel very uncomfortable. He'd expected better treatment than this, or, at the very least, had not expected to be so obviously disparaged against. At the moment he felt like a side-show freak. What did they have against him, exactly? Was this sleepy little town really so opposed to outsiders as this, or was there something about Ulrich in particular that set them off? He'd come to town in the hopes of doing an honest job. There was a missing person to be found, and it wasn't just any person. Ulrich was there to find out what'd happened to Dr. Siegfried Klein, a supposedly well-known and highly respected man. So, what was the trouble? The baleful glances of the folk in the diner made him wonder if he wasn't going to get ambushed and burnt at the stake.

He recalled the note of warning. Someone in this town knows you're here. And that certain someone, whoever they are, could possibly have something to do with the disappearance of Dr. Klein. Maybe they poisoned the well, spread rumors about you, so that your investigation would go nowhere. They want to let sleeping dogs lie, maybe. Spreading lies about you and making the whole town uncooperative would be a good way to shut down the case before it even begins.

He brought the mug of coffee to his lips, savoring in the bit of steam that rose off of it. Though the warmth was very much welcome, the taste of the stuff was another matter entirely. This was cheap, gas station-level brew, and was so bitter he nearly spat it out. Grimacing, he choked down a mouthful and then set the mug aside. It'd been over-steeped, or else had sat on the warmer so long it'd been burnt. “Haven't these savages ever heard of a french press?” he muttered, glaring at his mug. “These beans were probably roasted months ago. And I'll bet they don't even grind them on-site.” He frowned. “I've been served coffee that comes in a can. What kind of place is this?”

He was all too thankful when the waitress silently dropped off a glass of water he could use as a chaser.

Save for the occasional hushed murmuring or the noises coming from the kitchen, the place was silent. It was clear that he'd thrown a wrench in things, had upset whatever jovial mood had existed prior to his arrival. He wanted badly to leave, but the nagging hunger in his gut kept him in place. Hopefully they don't poison my food, he thought, glancing once more over the partition.

The waitress was carrying two plates towards his table. Without a word she set the breakfast platter and cheeseburger before him, along with the check. This, he chose to interpret, as a sign that the kitchen was closed. It was her way of saying, “Now, you'd better get the hell out of here and not ask for anything else.” She didn't come round after that, didn't stop to ask him how his food was or to offer any refills. That suited him just fine. Ulrich dug in at once, eating quickly both out of hunger and seeming necessity. The food had been messily plated, but didn't taste tampered with in any way. All of it was serviceable, about as good as he'd expected, and when the plates were clean, he dug out his wallet and threw down enough money to cover the meal. He also left a few dollars' tip, hoping in some way to thaw the waitress' icy mood. He'd need breakfast again tomorrow, after all.

He stood up and thanked the waitress quietly as he went to leave. She didn't hear him, or else pretended not to, and disappeared into the rear of the kitchen from whence there came yet another series of hushed murmurings. Even as he left the restaurant and pulled out of the parking lot, he felt the eyes of the staff and patrons upon him.

He could only hope that Professor Tillinghast would prove more accommodating than the locals he'd met so far. He was an expert in local history, and stood among the only people in town who might be able to shine some light on what he'd encountered the previous day in the Sick House. Straightening his rear-view mirror, Ulrich took off down the road in search of the Historical Society building.

Chapter 11

Detailed directions to the Historical Society were not easy to come by; the two pedestrians Ulrich stopped and asked seemed of the same disagreeable disposition as the folks in the diner, and almost gave the impression that they wished to mislead him. Despite their bald attempts at misdirection, Ulrich eventually found his way, discovering the modest little building just down the road from a gas station at the end of a long gravel drive.

It was a squat but sturdy little thing, built of dusty red bricks and appearing just large enough to avoid the status of “kiosk”. It was fronted by a white door, brightly painted, and featured a sign. The sign read, in neat, Arial print, THE VINTON COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY WELCOMES YOU.

A small window looked out towards him as he scaled the moist lawn, a collection of knots and divots spanning the hump of land. Standing upon the concrete porch, which was flanked by black iron railings on both sides, Ulrich cleared his throat and rapped gently upon the door. He didn't have to wait long for an answer, as the door was pulled open abruptly and a small man of perhaps sixty years and studious cast stood before him.

“Yes?” said the man, peering upward and adjusting the brassy frames of his bifocals against the crooked hook of his nose. The character of local historian could not have been more faithfully rendered than this, and so striking was the caricature that Ulrich had to stifle a laugh.

“I'm very sorry to bother you. My name is Harlan Ulrich, and I was hoping to share a word with Professor Martin Tillinghast, of the Vinton County Historical Society.”

The old man, the collar of his beige shirt thrown open and his vest sagging against his thin frame, cracked a toothy smile. “Well, I am pleased to report, then, that you are in the right place, and that you're presently face-to-face with the whole of the region's historical society.” The man's posture was corrected, and he stood up taller, his chin rising a few degrees in the hope of telegraphing pride. “With what might I assist you, Mr. Ulrich?” He stood aside, inviting his visitor into the building, which apparently featured only a single room.

Ulrich stepped inside, having to stoop as he entered through the doorway, and had a look around. There was one door, which may have led to a bathroom. Beyond this, there was a desk with one chair on either side of it and several rows of shelves stocked with handsome leather folios. Scarcely anything else entered into view. Within the space the smell of paper, of studiousness, seemed to permeate, and Ulrich was transported at once to the libraries and booksellers of his youth. He was knocked from reverie when his host waved him over to the chair opposite the desk. “What brings you here this fine day?”

“Yes,” began Ulrich, clearing his throat, “I'm very sorry to take up your time. I'm an out-of-towner, and am looking to do some research. I was hoping you could tell me about a local site... shine a little light on its history for me.”

The doctor laughed, dropping into his chair and leaning back. He wore a mustache in a closely-shaven style, and it framed the border of his upper lip with exactitude. Bringing a pinky finger to this feature he took to gently brushing it with his fingertip, as though setting the very fine hairs into place, and arched a brow. “There is no need to apologize, Mr. Ulrich. I assure you that in this little town of ours we've nothing but time. Certainly I cannot be said to be overworked this day. I was about to head out for an extended lunch when I heard you knock, though the prospect of putting these volumes to use is far more appealing a use of my time, methinks.” He motioned to the room about him, at the hundreds of black folios that surrounded them. “Furthermore, I can tell you're an out-of-towner; I feel confident in saying I know everyone in and around McArthur. It isn't a difficult thing when there are merely one-thousand, eight-hundred and ninety-one citizens to account for.” He frowned a little. “No, I suppose that's incorrect. There are one-thousand, eight-hundred and ninety at present. I forgot that Mr. Lapointe, a local barman, passed of pneumonia last week.”

“Remarkable memory,” replied Ulrich, nodding.

“Not so remarkable, in fact. I wear many hats in this town. I am tasked with tracking the census from year to year, you understand, so it is no marvel that I should know such things.”

Ulrich chuckled a little. “Indeed. I thought for a minute there, when you'd made an error in your calculations, that you'd failed to account for Dr. Siegfried Klein. I understand that he's well-known in these parts, and that he's recently gone missing?”

Tillinghast inhaled sharply, then leveled less friendly a stare on Ulrich than he'd hitherto done. “Oh, is that what this is about?” He wet his lips, tracing the black line of his mustache with yet more fervor. “You will excuse me, of course, if I find such discussions distasteful. I care little to converse about the events that have thrust our town into regional gossip, or to fuel the speculations of out-of-towners in matters that are none of their concern. The townsfolk have talked about nothing else since he went missing, and I am loathe to add any fuel to that fire, so if you'll excuse me, Mr. Ulrich, you've come to the wrong place for gossip. Moreover, the doctor was a longtime friend of mine, and I am unwilling to tolerate the poisonous rumor that surrounds his disappearance. It is injurious, and only those without respect for the deceased would discuss such things casually, much less travel all the way here just to gawk.”

Ulrich waved his hands in the air, shaking his head. “No, no, you misunderstand. You see, I'm a private investigator who's been hired by the family to find him.” He donned a grin. “And unlike you, I'm not ready to declare him deceased just yet. My interest is purely professional. I'm not looking for superstitious talk or hearsay. Just some facts to aid me in my search. As a friend of his, I hope I can count on your cooperation. The other folk in town have proven... well, unhelpful. They don't seem to want me here at all, in fact.”

This seemed to calm Tillinghast, and he nodded sharply, folding his hands and bringing them to his chin gravely. “It doesn't surprise me that the townspeople should mistreat you or regard you with suspicion. They probably expect any out-of-towners to have been drawn to McArthur by rumors of queer happenings and the doctor's disappearance. This region, you see, has long seen steady visits on the basis of its being a hotbed of the paranormal. This is not the case-- no supernatural phenomena of substance have ever been recorded here to my knowledge, and if such a thing had been recorded, well, I should know of it. But the superstitions of the locals and the setting itself lend themselves to stories, and then people, sometimes journalists, come sniffing around and...” He shook his head slightly. “Well, what is it you wish to know, exactly? An investigation has already been taken up by the authorities and nothing was found. I don't doubt your skill, but I'm unsure what you wish to find, or what you think I'll be able to provide you in the way of evidence. Any hope of finding Siegfried alive, I fear, is foolish.”

At that moment, Ulrich rather did doubt his skills as an investigator. He was at a loss as to how to best broach the subject of his investigation. Should he start, perhaps, with the events of the previous day? With the incident that had seen him fleeing from the Sick House after being spooked by something he couldn't explain? The handprint on his forearm began to itch like mad, and Ulrich tugged on his shirt sleeve to keep it out of view. “Erm,” he hesitated, “Well, I understand the doctor went missing en route to the former Sylvan Infirmary.” Keeping his eyes low, Ulrich flipped to a clean page in his notepad and plucked a pen from his breast pocket. “Is there anything you might tell me about that place?”

Tillinghast pursed his lips, standing up and scanning his vast collection before plucking a few hefty volumes from their shelves. “The Sick House?” he cleared his throat, dropping into his seat and thumbing through the first of three impressive tomes. “I could tell you many things about it, indeed. It is not the proudest fixture in this town's storied history, that much is certain.”

The next question dribbled from Ulrich's lips before he even knew what he was saying. “Is the place haunted?” He tensed in the next instant, immediately regretting it.

The professor's gaze narrowed, and he looked up from the volume. “Now, what part didn't you understand about avoiding superstitious gossip, Mr. Ulrich? To hear the paranoid locals talk about it, then my good friend the doctor was dragged to the Pit by phantasms in that place. It's a vile, poisonous bit of rumor that only serves to bring negative attention to the area. I should hope that a professional like you isn't fishing for garbage of that kind.”

“Sorry, I meant to say that I'd heard it was haunted from a few sources. I was wondering why it carried such a reputation.”

Returning to his reading, Tillinghast gave a little shrug, licking at his thumb as he turned the pages. “Why? Well, I think that's clear enough. It was an infirmary. Many people died there over the years. It's a sorry old building in the middle of an overgrown ghost town. Tickles the imagination in its way, wouldn't you say? What else might the locals make of it? Someone goes out there, sees something they can't immediately explain in one of its windows, or hears something they can't name on the wind, and suddenly it's a gateway to Hell itself.” He sighed impatiently. “There is no fountainhead from which these rumors sprang, not to my knowledge. It was merely the general feeling of the place that awarded it its reputation amongst ghost hunters and the paranoid folk of this town. Rest assured it's a dangerous place; all old, tottering buildings of its kind are. But haunted? Don't make me laugh.”

“Right. And, how many people would you say died there, while it was open?” Ulrich tapped his pen against the blank page, crossing his legs.

“Quite a few. The number is hard to pin down with any accuracy because record-keeping in those days was less than meticulous. The records, you understand, were lost or frequently tampered with; the sisters who ran that operation were not keen to lose their funding, and so the number of deaths was likely underreported, perhaps vastly. This fact has come out in the years since, an open secret of sorts. The nuns in charge have long since passed on however, so no charges were ever brought. More people surely died in that place than anywhere else in Moonville.”

“I see.” Ulrich traced a little circle in the air with the tip of his pen. There'd been nothing so far for him to write down, nothing that he hadn't learnt through research of his own.

“See here,” said Tillinghast, passing the folio to Ulrich. It featured an old map, seemingly hand-drawn and rich with detail. This map covered what was once Moonville, and highlighted a number of features, such as the old railroad, the well-known tunnel and the Sylvan Infirmary. “This was Moonville in its heyday. There were many streets threading throughout the village back then, though most of them are lost to the overgrowth today. And here,” he said, tracing the site of the infirmary, “is our Sick House. It was constructed in 1875, staffed by the Sisters of Mercy. Officially it closed in 1953, but was known to operate off the record, and under the noses of State authorities who'd deemed it unsafe, into the late 1950's or even early1960's. There was some disconnect between the diocese in Columbus and State officials, probably due to a tampering of the paperwork by the sisters in charge, that allowed the infirmary to continue operations in a clandestine fashion. The sisters believed in the work they were doing, despite the fact that their facilities were unsuitable for patients, and they were loathe to give up the funding that had sustained their order in this area for so long.”

“These nuns, are any of them still around? Is there a, uh... convent or something, in town?”

Tillinghast nodded. “Why, yes I believe that there is at least one of the sisters left who staffed the Sick house in its latter years. We haven't a convent, but Sister Ruth lives outside the church on Lancaster street, and may be willing to speak with you if you think her experiences may be of use in your investigations.” He furrowed his brow. “Though, I don't see why they would be.”

Ulrich wasn't about to mention the real reasons for his intense curiosity surrounding the Sick House to this dyed-in-the-wool skeptic. He'd encountered something there that he couldn't explain, and felt, somehow, that it might be related to his investigation. Maybe Dr. Klein had been drawn to the Sick House by that thing-- perhaps it had been the letter-writer, and upon his arrival he'd been attacked by it. There was no telling what “it” was, in this case. A ghost? A deranged, deformed squatter? Still, the case had taken for him a markedly unnatural turn, and if he was to continue his investigations, he felt it worth his time to pursue matters from every angle, no matter how unconventional.

“Why do you think Dr. Klein decided to visit the infirmary? I mean, it'd been closed for years...” Ulrich cocked his head to the side. “Surely he knew that?”

At this, Tillinghast kneaded his temples. He seemed lost in thought for a moment, but spoke up with a start as something surfaced in his memory. “A good question, indeed. I can't give a concrete answer, but what I can tell you is that Siegfried worked there briefly as a medical student. Not many people know this. He never really told anyone. As a part of his residency, he did volunteer hours at the infirmary. I doubt that he worked there after it was officially shut down-- I can't remember the exact time of his volunteering-- but it occurs to me that some associate from back then might've blackmailed him. This is complete speculation on my part, mind you, but if he did in fact work there after it was shut down, illegally, then perhaps he viewed it as a kind of blight on his otherwise excellent career. Maybe he wouldn't want it to get out; though, I must say it's been so many years that he needn't concern himself. No one would repeal his license for having done 'under the table' sort of work as a student, and his reputation would not be tarnished by such a revelation. Siegfried was a friend of the community, known far and wide for his skill and compassion. What I've told you is my best guess. I can think of no other reason that he would visit the place. Still, it is unthinkable to me that someone should bear ill will towards the man.” He cleared his throat, sitting up in his chair and smoothing over the front of his vest. “I understand that he received a note calling him to the infirmary, is that right? When questioned, the investigating officers had made mention of some written request... they were vague about it, however.”

Ulrich nodded, plucking the note from his notebook and handing it across the desk to Tillinghast, who accepted it with great interest. “Seems that someone sent him this about a month back, and he decided to follow up.” He frowned. “Very strange, though, that he should put any stock into this letter. It's an old message. Who could have sent it, and for what reason? I mean, of all the places to lure the guy, why the infirmary? His nephew, Jerome, also claims he's well-liked around these parts, so I'm not sure how I feel about the blackmail angle.”

Tillinghast handed back the note. “The note meant something to him; it was apparently enough to get him to go back. Why he did it, and where he ended up, are things we will likely never know, however.” Sighing, the professor licked his lips. “It is a sprawling wilderness that surrounds this little town of ours, Mr. Ulrich. A sprawling wilderness indeed. I pray that Siegfried, wherever he may be, did not suffer in the end. I expect that his body is somewhere in the field, obscured by overgrowth where none will ever find him; a result of a misstep deep in the woods. It is just as well. The man adored the outdoors and fancied a good hike. I can think of no better resting place. And, if someone did blackmail him, then one hopes that he will eventually be ferreted out and forced to pay for his crimes in a court of law. But I digress; that's merely an unfounded theory, and a tenuous one at that. Pardon me for my speculation. I hope that I haven't colored your perception of the facts with my conjecture.”

The professor continued. “Anyhow, I thank you for what you're doing. The townsfolk, however, are a close-knit, secretive type, and are unlikely to provide you with anything of substance where these matters are concerned, lest you turn out to be one of those blabber-mouthed, big-city types who takes our small-town gossip to press. I tell you, a few years ago, during a sighting in the Moonville Tunnel, we had journalists coming from Columbus and beyond, spreading miserable fairy-tales. The reason the folk in McArthur tend to distrust outsiders is because they're tired of their town being made into a laughing stock, a place whose only intriguing aspects are supposedly haunted locations. Though, it doesn't help that they themselves talk of nothing else. Most tourists come poking around in search of ghosts and devils. They don't care about McArthur or its history. It's a good thing you're here to do work of this kind, and not reporting on some incidence of haunting. They're unlikely to talk to you as it is, though if you were writing up some vapid article about the tunnel or cemetery, they'd likely run you out of town.”

“I appreciate the tip,” replied Ulrich. The value in this interview was rapidly dwindling. Tillinghast seemed sure Dr. Klein was dead; this might've been a suspicious sentiment under ordinary circumstances, except that, with each passing moment, the doctor's death seemed more and more a certainty. As he'd always maintained, the simplest explanation was almost certainly the correct one, and a death by misadventure was probable. There was a haze of confusion in the way, however, which kept him from fully embracing this line of thought.

First, there'd been Ulrich's own visit to the Sick House. He'd encountered something there. It'd left a mark on his arm and sent him running out. Then there was the note of warning he'd received the night before, urging him to stay out of “godless Moonville”. Maybe that was just some local woman's way of telling him not to stick his nose where it didn't belong, but he couldn't be sure. Then, of course, was the fact that a letter had been sent to Dr. Klein, asking him to visit the long-shuttered infirmary. That detail didn't make sense; there was no obvious reason for him to go there. So, why had he gone, then?

Cracking a smile, Ulrich looked to the professor sheepishly and pawed at the sleeve to his shirt. His forearm itched wildly, as if the handprint there was begging to be revealed. He wanted to show Tillinghast, to see if he'd ever seen anything like it, but feared the professor might think him a lunatic. “One other thing,” he said, unbuttoning the sleeve and slowly rolling it up. “Have you ever...”

Ulrich looked down at his forearm.

There was nothing there.

The skin was white, healthy. There was no sign whatsoever of the handprint that had marked it that very morning. Ulrich glanced over his arm incredulously before chuckling and pulling the sleeve back down. “Never mind,” he said, standing up in a hurry. His cheeks were beet red. “Thank you for your time.”

Chapter 12

“Fly Me To The Moon” came on loudly as Ulrich started up the SUV, allowing it to idle for a moment in the narrow drive outside the Historical Society building. He lurched forward in his seat, pressing his forehead against the grotty steering wheel and cursed under his breath. He tried to shut off the stereo, batting at it feebly with an open hand, but only succeeded in turning up the volume. He felt helpless, lost.

His usual investigations were simple, clear-cut things.

Usually, he'd track a target through his hometown. Back home, he had informants he could call upon. Guys who frequented shady bars, homeless guys with keen eyes, paperboys and such.

A polaroid or two of a cheating husband with his mistresses' legs wrapped around his torso was usually all the evidence he needed to get ahold of, though.

Slipping the pictures into an envelope, he'd hand them off to the wife, accept his pay and bow out of the client's life forever.

It was neat, clean, easy.

Well, not quite.

Often, the work was gritty, gross, irritating.

But it wasn't anything like this. This was the big leagues. Weird things were going on, things that had him doubting his own mind, and he didn't like it. Feeling as though he was losing his grip on reality, Ulrich fought back the urge to throw up and glanced at his forearm every few moments.

Nope. There was no handprint there.

What did this mean? He was certain, absolutely certain that it had been there earlier that morning. He'd been in the Sick House, had been grabbed by something that his memory was mercifully unclear on, and a mark had been left behind. A handprint, clear as day, in the hues of a serious bruise. When he'd gone to reveal it to Tillinghast however, he was floored to find it gone. It wasn't even that it had faded or worn off; there was literally no trace of it to be found. If it'd been some sort of ink as he'd earlier tried to convince himself, then there should have been at least a smudge left behind on the inside of his sleeve.

Nothing. The skin was pristine, unmolested.

Sinatra started into “My Way”, and Ulrich punched off the stereo with a growl. He put the seat back, sucking in a deep breath and thinking up his next move. What could he do now? The people in town hated him because they suspected he was just trying to capitalize on something sensational. The professor, one of his major leads, hadn't given him much to work with. The car was a mess, the only hotel in town was a dump, he'd gotten a letter that seemed at least a little threatening and he'd been terrorized in the old infirmary.

Everything sucked.

Tempted once again to throw in the towel, he maneuvered down the main drag, cracking one of the windows and allowing the cool autumn wind to mingle with the perspiration on his flushed brow. The tree-studded scenery passed; another strip mall featuring a book store and a craft store came into view. Beyond it, a McDonald's older than any he'd ever seen.

Still further ahead he stopped in an empty lot. It was reduced to gravel. A large building had apparently stood on the site once, and large slabs of concrete remained where its foundation had been. He parked and unearthed his notebook, flipping through its pages and trying to decide on his next lead. He'd taken the names of a few townsfolk; there was a restaurant-owner who'd seen Dr. Klein in the moments before he set off for the infirmary. Though, there was precious little chance of such a person chatting with an outsider about the incident. Ulrich promptly crossed out the name.

There was the old nun that Tillinghast had mentioned, Sister Ruth, who could be found out on Lancaster Street. Could the old nun tell him something about what'd happened? It was unlikely; she could only tell him about her time working in the Sick House, and such details were only pertinent to his own curiosities in the place, rather than the case. He flipped through his notebook impatiently, stumbling upon the name of the State Highway Patrol officer who'd been in charge of the initial investigation. “Officer Brent Stanley,” he uttered, scanning the page for the officer's direct office line.

Among the numbers listed, Ulrich found contact information for Dr. Klein's housekeeper, a woman by the name of Ramona Willis. She'd seen him the morning before he'd gone missing. “Well, maybe she'll be willing to talk,” he mused. Being close with the doctor, perhaps she would support Ulrich's investigation and cooperate by telling what she knew. At least, he hoped so.

Ulrich pulled his cell phone from his pocket and found he got a feeble reception. Holding it out before him in search of more bars, he punched in Ramona's number to set up an interview later in the day. The line crackled to life. Chipping away a bit of mud on the center console, Ulrich stretched and took in the cool breeze, hastily undoing the top button of his shirt and airing himself out.

After three rings, there was an answer. It was a young woman's voice. “Hello?”

Ulrich perked up, donning as pleasant a tone as he could. “Hello, am I speaking to Ramona Willis?”

From the moment the question left his lips, Ulrich could pick up on a certain consternation. It wasn't a vocal phenomenon, but the air soured immediately, like he'd picked at a wound not altogether healed. “No,” came the response a few moments later, and with a tremulous tone. “No, this is her daughter. My mother hasn't been seen in two days.” She paused to compose herself. “May I ask who's calling?”

Ulrich froze. Missing? The doctor's housekeeper was missing too? He bit his lip. What the hell is going on here? Is everybody in this godforsaken backwater going missing now? Mysterious disappearances must be very much in vogue around here. Hesitating, Ulrich opted to lie. “Oh, I'm sorry to hear about that. I was calling... on behalf of...” he coughed. “T-the bank.”

“The bank?” Ramona's daughter replied incredulously. “What bank?”

“M-my apologies,” stammered Ulrich. “I can see that now is not a good time to discuss the opening of a new, low interest homeowner's loan. Have a good day.” With that, he promptly hung up. “Shit.”

Wetting his lips, Ulrich returned to his phone, pulling up Jerome's number and dialing it with haste. It rang only twice before the familiar voice answered “hello?”

“Jerome, you ass, what have you gotten me into here?” demanded Ulrich, balling his fist.

“O-oh, is that you, Mr. Ulrich?” Jerome could be heard to gulp, a nervous laugh escaping his lips. “How are things going?”

Losing his temper and needing badly to vent to someone, Ulrich stamped his foot against the floor of the SUV. “Why, things have gone to shit, as it happens. First of all, someone in town knew about me. They knew my name, Jerome. Who did you tell? That was a mistake. You blew whatever cover I had.”

Jerome was quick to apologize. “I'm sorry! I'm sorry! You didn't tell me to keep quiet, and I gave my uncle's housekeeper, Ramona, a call to let her know that you were coming to town. I thought I should tell her in case you wanted to follow up with her. But she's the only one, I promise you!” He cleared his throat. “W-why? What happened? Should I not have said anything to her? She's not a gossip, I swear. I doubt she went and told everyone in town you were coming. She was close with my uncle, and would want him found. She's really very nice, and--”

Ulrich interrupted with fire in his voice. “And she's missing. There's that.”

A few moments passed before Jerome replied. “W-wait, she's missing? S-since when?”

“A few days, by the sounds of it.” Ulrich massaged at his temple with his fingertips, glancing at his forearm once again and finding himself unnerved by the lack of a handprint. It was almost freakier to see it gone than it had been to see it rendered on his skin. “What did I sign up for, Jerome? What have I gotten myself into? Things here are strange. People going missing-- as in, more than one. That's pretty significant for a town of less than two-thousand people. And then there's that old, disgusting infirmary building. I tell you--” He stopped himself from discussing his visit in detail. There was no sense in his divulging the specifics. It would only make him seem bothered and delusional. He took in a deep breath to compose himself. “I feel like this thing might be bigger than you let on, and if I'm being honest, this job's a little too heavy. This is police stuff, through and through.”

“Y-yeah, but they didn't find anything!” Jerome pleaded. “They gave it up, so that's why I asked you to look into it!”

Ulrich grit his teeth, beating back the chain of insults that surged to the fore of his mind. “Look here, you little--” He caught himself, closing his eyes and pursing his lips for a few seconds. “OK. I'm going to get the authorities involved. I'm going to call up your guy at the State Highway Patrol and see what they can tell me. Better yet, I'm going to see if they can't accompany me to that infirmary. It isn't safe to go alone.” This last phrase was uttered with a noticeable tremor. “But this isn't what I signed up for, Jerome. People are going missing, and I'd better not be the next one to vanish.”

Unsure of how to respond, Jerome tried to lighten the mood with a chuckle. “W-well, I'm sure it's not that serious. Right? Maybe Ramona just went out somewhere, hasn't come home yet. It's only been a couple days...” He paused. “I'm sure you'll be fine. You're a skilled investigator. I have faith in you.”

Suddenly, the entire conversation felt even more ludicrous. He hadn't called for a pep-talk, for Jerome's flimsy encouragement. Ulrich sniffed at the air. A skilled investigator? Hardly. He was lost here, completely aimless. Jerome had no idea what the last twenty-four hours had been like for him. After seething for a time, he finally responded. “I'll call you later when I know what's happening. Perhaps the cops will be able to tell me something.”

“OK, great. Thanks a lot, for all you're doing.” Jerome continued. “Oh, how's the car treating you? Is she holding up OK? You know, the boss doesn't usually let us lend dealership vehicles out--”

Ulrich hung up and dropped the phone into the passenger seat.

Two missing people now, both of them acquainted.

Though he believed in coincidences, he felt reasonably sure that this wasn't one.

Ulrich's workload had effectively doubled, because he had a terrible feeling that whatever was responsible for the doctor's disappearance was behind Ramona's as well.

He looked into the rearview mirror before slowly backing out onto the main road and putting the address to the police station into the GPS system. Will I be the next one to go missing? he wondered. Tensing his jaw, he left the empty lot behind and started onto his new route. I'd better not be. If I disappear, then who the hell's going to look for me?

Chapter 13

Ulrich had never been especially comfortable around cops.

It was true that he was used to dealing with them in his line of work; now and then a case would take a turn necessitating a call to the authorities. There'd been one case, an investigation of a local business by a former employee who claimed the owner was using the company as a front for drug-running. Ulrich's investigation had proven this to be true, however it was ultimately the local police who'd taken all the credit for his find. Even before that, he'd never been friendly with cops; they put him on edge. More than once he'd been made fun of for his choice of career, mocked for doing police-type work without the badge or responsibilities that came with it. He could handle their heckling, but detested the bureaucracy that they put in his way whenever he needed to get ahold of legal documents and the borderline aggressive attitudes that they sometimes presented with. Nine cops out of ten, in his estimation, were bullies with guns. One officer he'd gotten along with back in Toledo, long-retired, had a joke he often repeated. “Hell, even cops don't like other cops, Harlan.” Perhaps it was true.

The nearest station was a half-hour drive away in nearby Jackson, and by the time he pulled into the lot just off of the highway, he was sweating bullets. He didn't want to seem nervous or standoffish; he simply wanted to get ahold of what he could concerning the investigation of Dr. Klein's disappearance and perhaps enlist the help of an officer in searching the Sick House. It was a tall order, but a reasonable one, so long as he didn't bungle it.

Parking the car, he noticed that there was only one police cruiser in sight. It was a small station in the middle of a vast field of yellowed grass. The stations back in Toledo weren't awfully large, but compared to this little outpost they seemed enormous in retrospect.

Straightening his shirt and attempting to look as professional as possible, Ulrich wiped the sweat from his brow and prepared his identification. He wanted things to go as smoothly as possible, and hoped that the police wouldn't be nearly so opposed to speaking to out-of-towners as the citizens of McArthur were proving. Stepping through the threshold, he entered the carpeted lobby. Just inside the door, blocked by a sheet of bulletproof glass, was a desk. Behind it, sat a stern-faced officer with a bushy grey mustache.

OK, this is it. Don't blow it, he thought. Just act natural. With the warmest smile he could manage, Ulrich sauntered up to the desk and gave the man a nod. The officer looked up at him without amusement and stood up.

“Yeah?” asked the officer, leaning forward and giving Ulrich a once-over.

The lobby was austere; two plastic chairs flanked the windows. Sunlight drifted in through the thick panes, washing over the carpet. The blue carpet was washed out in places, thanks to the cumulative effect of the sun over the years. There was a potted plant, presumably fake, sitting on top of a side table that also featured a few dog-eared issues of Reader's Digest. Even from the door it was easy to see the thick layer of dust upon its waxy leaves.

“Sorry to bother you,” began Ulrich. “My name is Harlan Ulrich, I'm a private investigator out of Toledo. You know, up north. I was wondering if Officer Brent Stanley was in.”

The officer, whose name tag read Lt. Brown, arched a salt n' pepper brow. “Yeah, I know where Toledo is, guy. And Stanley's off today. On vacation, in fact. What can I help you with?”

Ulrich gulped, leaning against the counter and struggling to maintain his friendly demeanor. He was starting to sweat again, the interaction making him terribly nervous. Great, the one guy I wanted to talk to is off today. And this guy's already getting annoyed with me-- I haven't even told him what I want. It's like he can smell my fear. “I'm, uh... I've been hired to look into something.” He waved one of his hands in the air. The gesticulation was supposed to flow naturally, was supposed to convey a spirit of “Yeah, I talk to cops and ask them to do stuff for me all the time.” Instead, he looked like an idiot at a total loss for words. “T-there's a missing person in McArthur and I... I understand that your department was tasked with looking into it?” His voice was trending into the upper register, betraying his fraying nerves.

Lt. Brown grunted, hiking up his pants and throwing a glance over his shoulder at the office to his back. “You lookin' for that doctor?”

“Yes,” blurted Ulrich, “Dr. Siegfried Klein. That's the one.”

The officer licked one of his fingers and bent down to rifle through a folder, flipping through a number of papers. From this he removed a few sheets, which he scanned before passing to Ulrich through the drawer set just beneath the counter. “Fill this request form out.” It was one of those metal drawers, like the kind found in banks, which allowed both parties to exchange things without making physical contact. Precisely the kind that Ulrich always had trouble using. When the lieutenant had sent over the document, Ulrich fiddled with the drawer, tugging on the handle confusedly until it lurched open with a groan. He chuckled, casually removing the document and patting the drawer closed with an awkward motion.

Clearing his throat, Ulrich attempted to lighten the mood with some friendly chatter. “Things always this slow around here?”

“Most everyone's out on patrol,” replied the lieutenant, returning to his seat.

“Ah. They're sitting in the speed traps right about now, am I right?”

The joke went over like a fart in church.

“The request for information costs twenty bucks, by the way,” the officer added with a grunt.

Ulrich nodded soberly and made his way over to one of the plastic chairs, where he folded his lanky frame into the seat and leaned over the forms. He hadn't been given a clipboard or anything to write on, and instead tried to make due by pressing the paper to his knee. He filled out the paperwork sloppily, going through it as quickly as he could, before signing off on the bottom and fishing a crisp twenty out of his wallet. Then, fiddling with the drawer, he crammed both inside and shut the thing, watching as the lieutenant locked it. When the officer had both in hand, he looked over the messy work with a smirk and dropped it down onto his desk disinterestedly.

“Just a minute,” said the officer, turning around and disappearing from view. He could be heard to rifle through some papers just around the corner. Soon thereafter the humming of a copy machine sounded in the quiet office and copies were promptly spit out. Lt. Brown returned to the window and dropped the paperwork into the drawer. When Ulrich had it in hand and had succeeded in clumsily batting the drawer closed, he returned to his seat, and to the sales circular that sat upon his desk.

Reviewing the police report was a job of only a few moments. Literally, the sheet had mainly been left blank, featuring only a few indecipherable signatures he took to be those of the responding officers, and some generic notes about the exterior of the building and the grounds. There was no mention of the building's being searched beyond its entry-point, and a hasty note had been written, calling the place “obviously undisturbed”. It'd been a cowardly cop-out, a pathetic excuse for an investigation, yielding nothing of value. And a terrible waste of twenty dollars, too.

The investigator cleared his throat, catching the officer's attention once again and, with it, a glimmer of real annoyance in his eye. “T-thanks for this,” replied Ulrich before launching at once into his other request. “I wonder, though, if I could ask you another favor. You see, I'm supposed to look for this fella in town, but the place where he went missing is a little dangerous. It's, uh... taped off, you know. A crime scene, I suppose.” Ulrich tucked the papers under his arm and leaned in. “Is it possible, maybe, that your department could provide an officer as a guide? I mean... someone who could come with me to have a look at the place? For safety reasons as well as legal reasons...?”

Lt. Brown seemed poised to laugh in Ulrich's face, but his amusement rapidly faded and he gave a firm nod. “Y'know, as a matter of fact, I think I can help you out.” He looked to his back, barking into the office so loudly that Ulrich startled. “Hey, Mark, get out here, will ya?” He turned back to the jumpy investigator, chuckling. “Been trying to get this rookie out of here all day. He's still in training, but he'll be able to handle something like this.”

From the office there came a young man. Tall, blonde, with cheeks stained red as though from exertion. He was thin and his uniform fit him poorly. When summoned by his superior he took on a dramatic firmness however, and stood bolt upright. “Yes, sir?”

“You're gonna go with this fella here, mister, uh...” He glanced at the paperwork Ulrich had just filled out. “Harlan Ulrich. He's a PI, gonna go poke around in that infirmary for the missing doctor, got it? In Moonville?”

The youth's firmness was shaken by this news, and his glance jumped around between the lieutenant and the investigator. “W-wait, what?”

Lt. Brown stuck a thumb out, motioning to the rookie. “Mark here lives in McArthur. Knows that area pretty good, I reckon. His shift's almost done, so when you're done with him, just drop him off at his mama's house.”

Officer Mark looked on the verge of protest, but a slap in the arm from the lieutenant was sufficient to change his mind.

“Take good care of our PI here, got that?” The lieutenant opened a door, allowing Mark out into the lobby. He staggered, as though dazed by his new assignment, and looked to Ulrich with something like disdain.

Ulrich extended his hand to shake, but the grip that met his was limp and unenthusiastic. “Right, well, I'm Harlan Ulrich. Pleased to meet you.” When more talk was not forthcoming, Ulrich ambled out of the office and into the bright afternoon, leading the way to the mud-splattered SUV. Unlocking it, Ulrich opened the passenger-side door for the officer, who paused to appraise the vehicle with a grimace, before carefully and hesitantly getting inside.

“You been there yet?” asked Mark, putting on his seatbelt and looking straight ahead with a grimace. “To the Sick House, I mean.”

Ulrich nodded. Realizing that he might be charged with trespassing for his earlier visit, he chose to gloss over the bulk of the details. “I drove by it, at least.” A slight shiver passed down his spine as he recalled, with altogether too much clarity, the things he'd seen there. The foul air, the littered floors. And then, chief among his awful recollections, was that thing that had reached out and touched him. He wasn't sure what it was, if he'd even encountered anything at all. The whole visit had left him so disordered that he couldn't trust his memory. The disappearance of the handprint had only further confused things. But now, he'd have a witness. This time, if something happened in the infirmary, Ulrich wouldn't have to face it alone. “Looks like an awfully rundown place,” he added.

Mark scoffed, crossing his arms. “Trust me, it's a whole hell of a lot worse than it looks.”

Ulrich knew he was right.

Chapter 14

Conversation with the Officer Mark Dennison was sparse. Ulrich did manage to gather a few details; he was fresh out of the academy, made to do a lot of grunt work around the station by the lieutenant, and had lived in McArthur all his life. The investigator tried to act friendly, to further break the ice, but it was for naught.

The closer they got to Moonville, the more silent, and seemingly frightened, the officer became.

Mark provided directions to the infirmary, giving the lefts and rights as Ulrich needed them in the way that only a local could. Mark knew the twisting, tree-shadowed roads of his hometown well, and before long they'd left behind the small businesses and homes of McArthur and were entering into wilder territory. Moonville. One moment they'd been in town, the next the scene had changed profoundly. Both Ulrich and his companion grew tense and pale as the road transitioned into gravel, then into dirt. Dense tree cover shaded them from the otherwise pleasant sun.

This was a part of the same path he'd driven on during his initial visit to the Sick House. Ulrich noticed that the ground had firmed up a good deal since the recent rain, but this was little comfort. Some miles into this new path, far from the borders of town, when the first of dozens of ruined shanties came into view, Ulrich found his courage had completely abandoned him. It was like being on the top of a very large hill on a roller coaster and deciding at that moment that you want off the ride more than anything in the world. The fearful momentum was too much for him to resist. By robotically going through the motions, he pressed on, containing his fear and searching out that miserable building in the woods.

Desperate for conversation, Ulrich decided to ask the officer more about the Sick House. There seemed little harm in it; it was even possible that he'd learn something, what with Mark being a local and all. “They say this place is haunted. You buy that?” he chanced, his voice a little high.

Officer Mark didn't reply, but merely looked out the window narrowly. His body seemed tensed, like he was readying himself for some sudden fright. But then, when a few moments had passed, he finally spoke. His hands rested on his knees, and his right leg wouldn't stay still, rocking nervously as though he had to take a serious leak. “As kids, you know, sometimes we'd poke around in this area. The tunnel, the cemetery, the infirmary... they're all woven into the fabric of local life. Our mothers would warn us against visiting them, would tell us stories about how they were full of this monster or that ghost. We'd never listen, though. When you're young, there's a certain thrill to going to such places. Your life is boring, uneventful, and you feel the need to prove yourself. Never once did I meet a kid who willingly paid a visit to the Sick House more than once, though.”

Ulrich looked to the rookie, whose cheeks were flush again and whose hands were balled into fists.

“Once was enough,” continued Mark. “I... I remember, I was about ten years old. Set out with a couple of friends to seek out the place. Before that, I'd never gotten particularly close to the building. It was a summer evening, still light out, and we lied to our parents. Said we were going to go out to the pond for some swimming.” He gulped. “When we got there, we were stunned by just how quiet it was. These woods, you know, they're filled with birds and animals. But when we got within a stone's throw of that shithole, everything just went quiet. Felt like we'd gone deaf, almost. Me and two of my friends decided to keep going, to look into the windows and try the door. The smart ones stayed behind, cowering by the road.”

A rundown shack entered into view. With its missing door and shattered windows, and an interior packed with shadow, it presented like a human skull, picked clean. The white, chipped plaster on the outside even gave the impression of bone. As they passed, Mark nodded towards it. “Oh, places like that, there must be a hundred or more scattered throughout the woods. Used to poke around those a fair bit as a kid, and though I never faced much trouble for it, there are stories of the things that've been unearthed in those buildings. Things that shouldn't be there, or that no one expected to find. One shack, I heard, was full of bodies. Five or six of 'em, at least. This was years back, but I heard from a guy who's been on the force for ages that the bodies were lined up perfectly on the floor of the main room, in a straight line, like they were put there by somebody, or like they'd laid down to wait and simply never gotten back up. No telling how long they'd been there, or who they were; the bodies were too degraded to be recognizable, and I guess that this was in the days before modern forensics were really up to snuff. Rumor was that they'd been out-of-towners, or maybe squatters, but they were buried and the thing was kept hush-hush. Then there are the tunnels. Mind you, I don't know that there's any truth in this, but I heard that certain of the houses in this area sat above a vast system of tunnels.

“There were active mines around here once upon a time, which is probably where the stories come from. And the miners, I guess, were said to have tunnels beneath their homes through which they could meet with neighbors or access sites all across Moonville. I've always thought this one to be bullshit, a wild story, but just a year or so back, some local kids were poking around in an abandoned shanty and, what do you know they fell through the rotten floors and into a tunnel. They all needed stitches and one broke both of his legs. While the others scrambled out to get help for little Tom Richardson, whose legs were good and busted, he claims that something in that tunnel, something that he couldn't see, tried to drag him further down to God knows where. When the paramedics got there-- and it takes a while for the help to arrive in a place like this-- the kid was hysterical, whiter than a sheet. Despite his broken legs, he'd tried to walk, to scramble away from whatever it was he thought had been trying to get at him, and after he got squared away, the medics found some weird-looking scratches on his calves that they couldn't account for...”

At this junction, Officer Mark chuckled. It wasn't a happy laugh, however. It wasn't the laugh of one who'd just told a great jest. It was clear that Mark believed every last word he'd spoken, and that yet greater insights were to be divulged. Without realizing it, Ulrich had taken an unreasonably tight grip on the wheel. While he listened, his eyes were busy leaping from side to side, scanning the woods for any trace of the specious horrors that populated the shacks all around them.

“Growing up in a place like this, well, weird shit is par for the course. We were all used to it, hardened, if you will, even as kids. Great fuel for fireside ghost stories, for gossip at school, but it didn't keep us up at night-- most of the time. Let me tell you though, that Sick House? It's a different kettle of fish. That evening, when my friends and I walked up to it, I felt, for the first time in my life, that something was out to get me. I mean, seriously out to get me. Out for blood. Haven't been on the force long enough to see some real shit, but that building is meaner than any perp I've run across yet. I was shaking pretty good, all worked up, and I couldn't even tell you why. That place just put a scare in us.

“So, we kept going, like the stupid kids we were, and looked up into the windows. One of my buddies claimed he saw someone looking down at us from one of the windows. It was hard to tell; those things are old, dusty, and it's so dark inside. Well, when we got to the door, I tried the knob and it opened. Christ on His throne, it opened. I was terrified, thinking that there might actually be someone up there watching us from the windows, but at the same time, I just felt the need to poke around. It was like knowing a bear trap was right there, in plain view, but insisting on stepping into it. So we walked inside, just a bit. Went just inside the door.”

When Mark didn't continue, Ulrich urged him on. “Yes? And then what?”

Mark, though, was staring wide-eyed through the windshield. The outline of the infirmary had caught his eye and stolen the words from his lips.

Pulling up to the byroad that led to the infirmary, Ulrich parked the car and joined his companion in gawking at it.

Mark continued in time, unbuckling his seatbelt and never once letting the building out of his sight. It was clear he considered it a threat, and refused to turn his eyes from it lest it capitalize on his inattention. Licking his lips but finding his mouth bone-dry, he choked down a bolus of dread and wiped at his pallid brow. “We walked in there, and I swear to you, there were people inside.” He gave a shuddering sigh. “The main room in there, it's big, open. Two doors on either side that have little glass panes in 'em. Well, there were faces pressed against the glass, a few of them. Awful faces. Couldn't see them so good because the glass was thick, cloudy, but the general outlines were there. And in that main room, standing in the corners, still as statues, were others. They looked at us, stared real hard. Couldn't see their eyes... even now I'm not sure that they had any. All of them, five or more, were pale, unkempt-like. They were stationed about the room like pieces of furniture, just watching, waiting, for God knows what. Maybe they just wanted us to come in, to wander further. I don't know. In the years since I've tried to convince myself that they just wanted someone to talk to. Like they were lonely, right? But, no... those weren't lonely eyes. There was hate in 'em. We didn't stop long enough to figure it out one way or another-- me and my buddies, we ran, crying, till we left the woods and ended up back in town. And on our way out, looking up through the window, I saw another face. Something up there was watching us flee. Had big, white eyes. Dead eyes. Like eggshells. The skin was a glowing white, too, except that its whole body was streaming in blood. Ever seen a man bleed out? Seen a guy die from a serious gunshot wound or a slashed artery? It was like that, except for as long as I watched, the blood never stopped flowing from head to toe. And though its eyes were dead, blank, I sensed in them that same hatred. Envy for the living or something, who knows. I never been back since.”

When he was done with his story, he let out a deep sigh, as if relieved to have gotten it off of his chest.

Leaning back in his seat, Ulrich pursed his lips. After hearing all of that, he was less interested than ever before in reentering the Sick House. The pair was paralyzed by the sight of the place for several moments, until Ulrich broke the spell and mechanically threw open the driver's side door. He lowered his gaze, stepping out onto the road, and let his shoulders roll back to alleviate the tightness that was quickly developing there. Though his knees wanted to butt heads, he turned back to the car, where Officer Mark was shakily climbing out, and summoned up the widest grin he could. “Let's see if anyone's home today, eh?”

Chapter 15

“So, we're looking for Dr. Siegfried Klein.” Ulrich crossed his arms and looked up at the infirmary building, still many yards away, and frowned. “And there may be another who's gone missing. I can't say whether it's related, and I haven't been hired to look into it, however I understand that the doctor's housekeeper, Ramona Willis, hasn't been seen in about two days.”

This brought the first smile to Officer Mark's lips in some time. “Oh, I wouldn't worry about her.”

“Why not?”

“Old Ramona's a good woman, real devout, but she's got something of a drinking problem. It isn't rare for her to take off on days-long benders. Probably hungover somewhere, crashed at a friend's house. It's happened before. As long as I've known her, in fact.”

Ulrich chuckled. “Well, damn.” Here he'd been concerned over the woman, worried that she'd ended up like Dr. Klein, when in reality she was widely known as a wandering drunk. A lot of good that'd done him. Paling around with a local was paying off; he'd learned more about the woods and the Sick House from this rookie cop than he'd gained from the learned Professor Tillinghast. Straightening himself and starting slowly towards the infirmary, Ulrich continued. “The missing doctor. Did you know him?”

“Sort of,” replied Mark, his visage drawn into a weary squint. He looked up at the building like it might reach out and smack him, and his shoulders were hung low. “I knew of him, mostly. He's a popular guy around here. Caused a minor sensation when he disappeared.”

“Any idea why he decided to venture out here all by his lonesome? Mighty suspicious to me.”

Mark shook his head. “Not a clue.”

The Sick House sat silently ahead, its dark brown bulk fending off the sun. It was a fine day out, sunny and calm, though one never would have known it from this spot in the Moonville woods. The swaying of the canopy in the breeze made for a moving, living barrier through which the sunlight was kept at a distance. What little made it through onto the property and the infirmary building itself was scarce, and the wooden panels on the exterior were lit up in little tongues of shimmering light like lit wicks. The dark windows at the building's rear looked on mournfully, the dust-clotted depths of the place teeming with still more phantoms for the stories Mark had just told. Ulrich had encountered something in there, and Mark had, too, from the sounds of it. Suddenly, he was thankful to have only been accosted by a single inhabitant of the house, rather than by a score of them.

Then again, he was feeling mighty stupid for returning to the Sick House at all.

Shame on you if you fool me once... shame on me if you fool me twice. Didn't learn your lesson, did you? Just have to see this through. Made it out OK the first time round, but this time you're just determined to push the envelope further, aren't you? Ulrich felt bolder with Mark at his side, but couldn't shake the feeling that this little trip of theirs was a profoundly idiotic errand. A suicide attempt, maybe.

Were the spirits-- or whatever it was that they both knew to dwell in the house-- truly dangerous? Mark didn't seem to doubt it, even though they hadn't done anything to him and his childhood friends. Ulrich, though, had been touched by one. Something at the top of the stairwell had reached out and grabbed him with an icy grasp. His arm still tingled despite the lack of a visible mark, and he rubbed at it absentmindedly as he walked on.

“Let's have a look around the grounds, first,” said Ulrich, leading the way to the front of the building, where the faded wooden sign could be seen. When they rounded the corner and came within view of the open door, Ulrich feigned surprise. “Wait a minute, what's up with that?” he asked, pointing at the entrance. “Last time I was here the door was blocked off, yellow caution tape and all that. Where has it gone? Did someone break in?” This was a lie, of course. The tape had been gone during his last visit, and he himself had entered the building without a second thought.

Mark gulped, his hand levitating over his gun. He composed himself, giving a little shake of his head. “Let's not jump to conclusions. We'll take a look around outside and see what we find. Then we'll worry about the inside.”

The ground about the Sick House was still mighty damp. Their footprints left deep impressions in the mud. Here and there, sticking out of the ground in heaps, Ulrich noticed the stiff edges of bird wings. He recalled the way the birds had been drawn to the building, the way he'd heard their fragile bodies slamming against the exterior during his last visit. The trees were silent, however, and nothing seemed intent on crashing into the infirmary at the moment. The silence that Mark had spoken of during his story was certainly in place today. Their surroundings were pestilentially quiet. It didn't help that, as they putzed around the grounds, looking for any evidence of the missing man, the house looked down upon them with its dark, glassy eyes. The door could be heard to squeak slightly with the passage of the breeze, and its dark mouth seemed to beckon them. Each time it did so, the pair would look up at it, and then to each other, without bothering to veil the fear in their eyes.

Just what they were looking for Ulrich wasn't sure. Scraps of clothing, new footprints, discarded weapons-- anything would do. As of that moment, his best guess was that Dr. Klein had been swallowed up by the Sick House like some tasty morsel, or else was rotting in some ditch not too far off from their present position. It occurred to him, too, that the subterranean tunnels Mark had spoken of might extend to the infirmary. His previous search of the Sick House hadn't been thorough enough to know whether such tunnels existed beneath the building, though it seemed a possibility. Had the Dr. disappeared into the tunnels? And, if he had, had he gone into them of his own volition, or been forcibly taken into the deep by something else? He wasn't in any rush to figure it out either way. To search for such tunnels would require him to visit the darkest, most sun-forsaken corners of the infirmary.

Mark mentioned those tunnels... said that a local kid claimed to be dragged deeper down by something he couldn't see. Ulrich rolled up his sleeves, the chill wind mingling with his cold sweat and inciting a peculiar nausea. What the hell is this town all about? Why was it abandoned to begin with? I have a hard time believing there's a bunch of mole-people hanging out underground, but if there's something down there, in those tunnels that supposedly link everything together, then I'm sure it isn't cuddly. Perhaps he'd pay Tillinghast another visit and ask him about the existence of these tunnels. The professor hadn't mentioned them during their meeting, but if they were real, then he'd almost certainly know of them.

Ulrich nearly bumped into Mark, who was staring up at the infirmary windows, slack-jawed. His face had gone white, his legs weak. “What is it?” asked Ulrich, glancing up at the building. There was nothing in the windows to be seen, save for the same pervasive darkness that always dwelt there, but that the place had a tremendous, paralyzing effect on the youth there could be no doubt.

Mark merely shook his head, lowering his gaze and starting once more into his half-hearted search.

“I don't think we're going to find a whole lot out here. I know that your department already had a look, but I think we're going to have to go in there and poke around.” Ulrich pointed to the open door, gritting his teeth. “It's possible they missed something, or that the doctor left some trace behind of his visit. If he even made it this far, of course. If we don't find anything here, it's safe to say he didn't make it to the infirmary at all and either bought the farm while hiking or his body's been dumped elsewhere.” He turned to canvass the surrounding woods, dim with smoke-like shadow.

That was when he saw it.

A woman.

Well, not quite. It was the suggestion of a woman. She was thin, young, if the subtle curve of her body was any indication, and completely naked. Her body looked as though it'd been drawn in the air with a piece of thick, white chalk. It was a mist, sustained in shape and size by some mechanism he couldn't comprehend, and it moved in flickering, jumpy motions as though it were being shoddily projected. The faintness of its form made it hard to make out much in the way of concrete details, but the face was clear enough. It was a long face, with a slender, elegant nose. Long hair, at least shoulder length, and intense eyes framed by well-shaped brows were the characteristics that most struck him before the thing began to gradually evaporate.

Ulrich reached out and tugged Mark's sleeve without even thinking, and pointed out at the rapidly-fleeting specter. He couldn't put a name to it, wasn't sure what it might be called, and simply stammered, “L-look, it's a g-ghost, right there, n-near the trees!”

Mark was about to turn around when something caught his eye nearby. It was in a patch of overgrown grass near the border of the property. The recent rain had drudged it up into view where it had presumably been buried. At glancing it, his eyes went wide and he scrambled for his phone-- which was thankfully equipped with a satellite connection. Dropping to one knee, he dug around in the soft ground for a time, loosing a string of curses under his breath all the while. “Holy shit, holy shit,” he muttered, clearing away dirt and debris from his find.

“What is it?” asked Ulrich, racing to his side. He was still shaking for the mysterious sighting, but all trace of the ghostly woman had vanished into the air. There was no sense in his pressing it, and he knew it.

Looking into the small hole the officer was digging, it was clear to see what'd caught his attention. A large bone, possibly a femur, was sticking out awkwardly. The head of the thing had been visible just over the grass-line, revealed by some shifting of the ground during the recent storm. Beneath and around it, Mark was finding other bones; the top of a skull, smaller bits that looked like fingers or toes. There was a good deal of what appeared to be ash mixed in along with the bone matter; a grey, pasty kind of mess that stood out from the dark soil.

It was a skeleton, the visible portions charred as though the meat had been burnt off of the bones.

Ulrich's heart sank, his stomach roiled. “Oh, God.”

It seemed he'd found his man.

Chapter 16

The blaring of sirens broke the silence, ricocheting off of the trees and hills like the sordid cries of so many suffering animals.

Ulrich and Mark had waited in the SUV for backup, saying little and doing their best to avert their gazes from the field where just minutes prior they'd stumbled upon a body. At the end of a case, Ulrich usually felt happiness, or at least relief. This time, though, both were noticeably absent. The case had come to a close, the target of his search found resting in a shallow grave. That was where his involvement ended. This wasn't a missing person's case any longer, but a homicide. He could have speculated till he turned blue about the reasons why someone might have lured the old doctor to that sinister property and why they'd seen it fit to murder him. The assailant had done a poor job in hiding the remains; the tremendous rain caused a shift in the landscape and dredged them up. The pair had been at the right place at the right time and should've been pleased with their work. After all, finding Dr. Siegfried Klein alive was never a guarantee.

But the two of them, who'd set out for that miserable infirmary and perhaps harbored hopes that they would find nothing, thus cutting their visit short, had hit the mother lode. And they were both tremendously unsettled by their find. For his part, Mark was quick to follow procedure and put a call out to the station dispatcher for backup, but his professionalism was shaken. This was probably among the first bodies he'd ever seen. It wasn't Ulrich's first, but it wasn't exactly the kind of thing he could ever get used to.

The young officer traded numbers with Ulrich and promised to keep in touch with him if there were any developments in the case, as a courtesy.

Ulrich had to wonder if he really cared to hear about any future developments, though.

Wasn't this technically “case closed” for him?

He could call Jerome in the morning and head home. He could return the keys to the SUV, collect the rest of his payment and walk away from this case that'd so perplexed him for the past few days. It's over, he kept thinking, as if attempting to convince himself.

Increasingly, another voice chimed in from the back of his mind.

It isn't over. Not yet. Don't forget about the shit you saw in that old building. The doctor might've been found, but this isn't over, not by a long shot. For you, it's just started.

Nine times out of ten, Ulrich would've been too happy for a simple resolution. He could've thrown his hands up, like he always did, and surrendered his responsibility for the client to the authorities. It was in their capable hands now, after all. But there were so many unanswered questions in this case, not the least of which pertained to him personally. Perhaps if he hadn't been touched by the case himself it would've been easier for him to punch the clock and leave McArthur in the rearview mirror.

But until he had some answers of his own, he wasn't going anywhere. Until he knew what he'd encountered in the Sick House, till he'd learned what really went on in there that had successfully scared off generations of locals, he couldn't just quit. It was a matter of pride. And idiotic curiosity.

When the pack of cop cars arrived, Officer Mark hopped out to meet them. Ulrich gave a little statement, but the bulk of the paperwork was handled by the young officer, who managed to put aside the fear he'd carried and bask in the limelight. The other officers from his department, his seniors on the force, seemed genuinely proud of the work he'd done and congratulated him roundly.

Ulrich laughed to himself as he returned to the SUV. And the cops take the credit all over again, I see. Never mind that I was the one who suggested we look out here in the first place. That didn't really matter to him, though. Not this time. He was thankful for Mark's help on the case, and hoped the find would bring him more respect from those on the force. Perhaps the lieutenant wouldn't be so hard on him now, and would let him do more than mere desk duty.

Looking up at the Sick House in the waning light of day, Ulrich shared a word with the officer in charge and, when he was no longer needed, took his leave. Coasting along the dirt road towards McArthur, Ulrich was relieved of one mental load and simultaneously burdened with another, however.

Siegfried Klein was dead.

His whereabouts were known, now.

That part of the equation was filled in, crystal clear. Poor sap, or whatever the cops could dig up of him, was in an evidence bag.

But why?

Just asking himself the question gave him a headache. He shouldn't have really cared, after all; he'd never so much as met the doctor, had no investment in the man or his well being. Ulrich was just a hired gun and the old doctor had been a prize in a high stakes scavenger hunt. It'd be uncomfortable breaking the news to Jerome, it was true, but that was part and parcel with the job. Someone had to do it. He smirked, thinking that perhaps he'd ask Officer Mark to make the call to him instead, and spare himself the client's sadness and tears. But even so, that would not have been enough to erode the profound curiosity and mounting dread that now ailed him. He wouldn't be able to put this one out of his mind until he did some more digging.

I'm not altogether fond of Jerome, but I can't face him this way. It isn't right. He paid for a job well-done, and I owe him a little more than this. As of now, I don't even have a motive for the killer, much less a good suspect. The doctor was murdered, buried outside the Sick House. And that's all I've got. It's too sloppy to just collect my pay and shrug my shoulders. The guy won't get any closure that way. It'd be like cheating... real sloppy... too Harlan Ulrich, I guess. Ulrich wanted to break the mold, go the extra mile without being told to. He'd accepted this case and now his pride wouldn't permit him to half-ass it.

The day was fading, and for the moment, Ulrich felt like he'd done enough. He'd return to the Hotel Acardi, crash in that unkempt room and resume his investigation in the morning. Perhaps he'd share a word with the hotel clerk, ask him more about the woman who'd dropped off the note. In the morning, too, he'd speak to Sister Ruth, who still lived near the local church. A second visit, or at least a call to Tillinghast was also in order.

Entering sleepy McArthur, Ulrich almost found the scenery a comfort. It was still a boring splotch on the map, full of hostile townies, but it beat the hell out of the woods and the hideous buildings that populated it. Here, at least, he felt safe. There was a bit of distance between himself and all of that horror he'd courted in Moonville.

Though he was thankful that he wouldn't have to return to the terrible ghost town, he knew in the back of his mind that his surveyance of the Sick House was not altogether finished. The final pieces of this puzzle, if they were to be found at all, still lurked there. He planned to fill his day by seeking additional information from other sources, but at the end of the day there couldn't be the least doubt that whatever he learnt would lead him back to the doorstep of the Sylvan Infirmary.

Chapter 17

The clerk was fanning himself with a newspaper when Ulrich walked into the rental office of the Hotel Acardi. He was wearing the same outfit he'd been wearing the night previous, and the garments featured the same stains in the same places. It was doubtful that the fellow ever changed out of those clothes. He met Ulrich with a little grin and set down his newspaper. “Now, what are you doing back here, Mr. Ullman?”

“It's Ulrich,” the investigator was quick to clarify. “And as it happens, I'd like to stay another night. I don't suppose room number four is still available, is it?”

He clapped his meaty paws together and chortled, struggling to get up from his rickety chair. His body bobbed once, twice, before he finally built up enough momentum to launch his bulk out of the seat. “Baby, it's just the way you left it. It's like you never went.” He did a little figuring, then dug around in a pile of disordered forms. Dashing through a few things with a pen, he made changes to the agreement Ulrich had signed previously and then peered up at him through the plexiglass barrier. “I tell ya what, I'ma give it to you for forty tonight.” He wedged a thumb inside the waistband of his sweats. “I'm feelin' generous.”

Ulrich chuckled under his breath and handed over a pair of twenties without protest. The man could've charged him twice that and he wouldn't have argued about it. The Hotel Acardi was the only game in town and Ulrich was desperate for a bed.

The clerk fiddled with the bills, smoothing them out and setting them inside a lock box before donning a fresh grin, somehow grimier than the last. “You caught me at a fine time, Mr. Ulrich. Was just about to take my lunch break and hit the sauna. Don't suppose you wanna join me? It's spacious in there, and it's relaxin'. Just melts the stress away.”

Ulrich shook his head, turning around and preparing to leave. “Oh, uh... no thanks. It's not really my thing. I'm hurting for some sleep.”

Throwing his hands out, the man groaned in exaggerated disappointment. “Aw, you're breakin' my friggin' heart, baby. And here I thought a big-city PI like you would wanna talk about that woman who dropped off the note yesterday.”

“What?” was all Ulrich managed to say, his legs stiffening at once and causing him to halt before the door. If this guy knew he was a PI, there was really no telling what else he knew. Wriggling on the hook, Ulrich looked back at him and took the bait. “Well, now that you mention it, a sauna sounds mighty relaxing.”

The clerk laughed. “I'm glad you think so. Course,” he added, rapping his sausage-like fingers against the desk, “it might cost ya a few bucks.”

Ulrich pulled out his wallet and counted out a handful of smaller bills. “You're pushing it.” Reaching over, he thrust them through the opening in the plexiglass barrier.

The clerk tucked them away and then opened a side-door, stepping out into the lobby. He brought with him a pair of white bath towels, and threw one of them Ulrich's way. Next came the keys to room four. “Come with me, baby. We got some relaxin' to do.”

Chapter 18

Stripping down and sitting in a hot little box with the sweaty hotel clerk was the last thing Ulrich had ever envisioned himself doing that night.

But there he was all the same, a towel draped over his lap, face pouring in sweat and somewhat short of breath. Ulrich had never been one for sauna; it was more torturous for him than it was relaxing. The smell of hot cedar permeated the wooden box, which wasn't nearly so spacious as the clerk had made it sound. In fact, there was barely enough room inside for the two of them. Two seats were positioned across from the container of super-heated stones, one close to the ground, the other elevated above it. The clerk took the higher spot, claiming that it was all the hotter up there, and Ulrich the lower seat. In this configuration, the clerk's sweaty knee continuously bumped against Ulrich's bare shoulder, and every time it did so, the investigator couldn't but wince.

The clerk wasn't shy, had dumped his clothes in a heap outside the sauna, and kept the towel draped over his lap only as a formality. Sitting around, sweating in the nude with strangers came naturally to him, apparently. He was some time in speaking, leaning back and sighing with great enthusiasm. When he finally spoke, it was about the sauna, rather than what Ulrich had come to discuss. “This is high-quality, treated red cedar. Crank her up to about two-hundred degrees. When we're through here, I got a hose out there we can spray off with. It's good and cold out, so you know that water's gonna feel like ice.” He talked like he was really looking forward to it.

Ulrich gulped, finding his mouth robbed of saliva. Already he'd been sitting there, fidgeting uncomfortably, longer than he'd ever done in a sauna. Once, as a young man, he'd used a sauna for a few minutes at an athletic club. After that experience, where he'd ambled out light-headed, he'd decided it wasn't for him. This time, he'd already been baking for at least ten minutes, and he could feel his heart rate gradually climbing in a kind of panic. Was this what it was like to die in the desert? The dry, intense heat washed over him continuously. His skin was hot and sweaty to the touch, but it was the warmth that sprang up from inside him that was most striking. His organs were getting toasty. Surely that wasn't healthy. He scratched at his scalp, and was shocked to find his hair hot to the touch. It felt dried out, like a mound of greying straw about to ignite in the summer sun.

Ulrich cleared his throat. He'd had just about enough of the heat and wanted to get the clerk talking. “So,” he began, “who dropped off that note?”

Sniffing at the hot air and spreading his legs a little further so that his pudgy knee bumped Ulrich's shoulder for the hundredth time, the clerk replied, “If I'm not mistaken, it was a middle-aged lady, name starts with 'R'. Rebecca Williams.” He paused. “Nah, Willis. Rhonda Willis? Something along those lines.”

Ramona Willis had dropped off the note warning him to stay out of Moonville. That much was obvious to Ulrich. Now the only question he had was why the woman had delivered the message. What was she trying to warn him away from? Was it simply a warning borne from superstitious fear that'd compelled her to do so, or did she actually know something about Moonville? Was there something she was specifically attempting to guard him from? The clerk's further rambling on the matter only served to further convince him that it'd been Dr. Klein's housekeeper, Ramona, that'd dropped off the note. Everything the clerk said jived with what Officer Mark had described.

“She was lookin' mighty out of sorts, probably on the tail-end of one of her famous benders. Sweet lady, but everyone in town knows she's a real lush. Woman drinks like a fish.” He sat up, wiping at his brow. “So, uh, what brings you out here to the middle of nowhere? Your license said you were from Toledo. Kind of a long way for a PI to go for some R-and-R, no?” He laughed, his grating voice echoing throughout the box.

“How do you know that?” asked Ulrich, turning up towards him. “That I'm a PI. I don't remember telling you.”

The clerk cracked a smile. “Well, ya see, we got this thing nowadays. It's called the Internet, and lookin' up someone's name is a real simple thing. I like to know who's stayin' at my hotel, and when they're outta-towners who have people droppin' off real strange notes for 'em, then I pay attention. You, uh... you been pokin' around in the woods out there? That, uh, ghost town?”

Ulrich nodded. “A bit.” He was miffed that the rude clerk had seemingly read the note. “Tell me, do you read all of the private correspondence that comes through here for your guests?” he asked, glaring back at him with annoyance.

The clerk declined to answer that question and instead continued his own speculations about Ulrich's presence in the area. “Lookin' for that doctor, eh? The one that went missing?” It was strictly a rhetorical statement; that he already knew the answer was clear.

“Yeah. And I think we found him.”

Clicking his tongue, the clerk seemed to understand the meaning behind this and shook his head so that fat drops of sweat flew from the locks of his greasy hair and onto Ulrich's bare back. “Shame about that. Damn shame.”

Ulrich shuddered, the smell of evaporating sweat mingling with the scent of baking cedar and inciting nausea in him. Either that or he was beginning to get dehydrated. He tried to swallow, but his throat was made of clay.

“Lots of stories came outta that town in the old days,” said the clerk, closing his eyes and turning his face to the ceiling. He gave a satisfied sigh. They'd been in there at least fifteen minutes now. Either that or Ulrich's panicked, crispy mind had lost all capacity for figuring the passage of time. How long did the man plan to sit in there? Till they became literal mummies? He continued. “When I was a kid, and even before that, they had a lot of weird stories. The tunnel, ya know, it brings a lot of people through here. Best known attraction in the whole area. That infirmary building, though, it's a little harder to get to, and only the real hardcore types seek it out. I remember my dad telling me not to go there when I was a little one.” He chortled. “Said that when he was a kid, he and his friends would hear screams and shit comin' outta there, like people were being hacked apart or some shit. Makes me wonder why the ol' doctor went out there.”

Ulrich, unimpressed by this, lowered his head and fought to catch his breath. “Doesn't surprise me. It was full of the critically sick and mentally ill.”

The clerk opened one eye, leveling it on Ulrich firmly. “Nah, it wasn't like that.” He cleared his throat. “I'm not saying that the place wasn't packed with loonies, but the screams-- my dad, and others, said that it was like people were being picked apart. Hurt. Some even say experimented on. Now, I know how that sounds, but there was a rumor flyin' around about that time among those who was old enough to know that some questionable shit was going down in the infirmary after it was supposedly closed down.”

Ulrich shrugged. “And?”

“And maybe that's why it's haunted,” spat the clerk matter-of-factly. “Now, I can't say for sure, 'cuz I've never been personally, but so many folk have seen shit in there it's gotta be related. Think about it. Sick people, crazy people, all of them being tortured and whatnot. Ain't no one gonna fade away peacefully after somethin' like that. Nah, they'd linger behind, like a black stain on the place. Hell, I know I would if it were me.” He pursed his lips, then added, “At least, that's what they say.”

Hauntings. Before that day, Ulrich would never have put stock into any discussion of such things. Rational explanations for singular events were easy enough for him to come up with, and even in those cases when reason could furnish no such clarification, it was much easier to simply tune it all out as nonsense. He couldn't do that anymore, however. His visits to the Sick House, and the conversations he'd had with Officer Mark, had changed him. He was far more willing to entertain talk of the paranormal now than ever before, and if not for the great discomfort that wreaked his body in the sauna right then, he might've been far more interested in the clerk's ramblings. As it was, he felt ready to burst out of his own skin, to run out of the little box and roll around in the cool grass until his body returned to a normal temperature. Nonetheless, his curiosity saw him stay. “Interesting,” he muttered.

“The old-timers don't like to talk about it, least of all with outsiders like yourself,” said the clerk, adjusting himself on the seat and repositioning his towel. “And if I was you, I'd keep from asking too many questions about such things unless you know who you're dealin' with. It's liable to get you into some trouble, if you catch my drift. The nuns who ran the joint were well-liked, very respected, but some stories came out of all that Sick House business that had people talkin'. Rumor has it there was a killer nun that worked there; broke her vow by murderin' some patient and then disappeared. Dunno much more than that, and maybe it's just an old story, but I tell ya, when I was a kid we all believed it. Mothers even used to warn off their kids from that spot by tellin' 'em the Devil's Nun might snatch 'em up.”

This was the first he'd heard of any killer nun. Ulrich smirked. “A killer nun, huh? That's a new one. And yeah, I get the feeling that the people around here aren't fans of folk like me, who ask too many questions. I hear it's because they don't want us taking what we've learned out of here and spreading sensational lies about the town. Rumors and all that, which might wreck the place's reputation.”

“Ain't just that, baby,” interjected the clerk.

“Oh?”

“McArthur's been around a long time, and there's lots that these people are proud of. But, uh... that shit out in Moonville I just talked about? Well, stranger, that ain't it. If you lived out here, you wouldn't be all too proud of what was done in that old Sick House either. The people of this town keep holding that stuff close, hoping that it'll die out, end up forgotten.” The clerk's cast took on an uncharacteristic firmness. In all their dealings over the past few days, Ulrich had never once seen him look so grave. “But things like this... suffering of that kind, well, it can't just be forgotten. And I reckon it's going to linger in those woods, waiting to be found out, even long after the two of us have bought the farm.”

“Maybe so,” admitted the investigator, his nose dripping with a steady stream of sweat. “I never did catch your name.”

“It's Dennis. Dennis Acardi. My grandfather opened this hotel years back, and it's been in the family ever since. Seen better days, of course. It is what it is. Bein' the only game in town helps,” he said, his expression softening into a grin. He climbed down from his perch, throwing open the door and letting out a good deal of the heat. “Let's hose off. Been in here long enough,” he said, dropping his towel and walking out into the evening butt-naked.

Wrapping his towel tightly around his midsection, Ulrich staggered out behind him, the cool air washing over him and sending him into delicious shivers. The autumn chill was the most pleasant thing he'd ever felt, and it was all he could do to cast off his towel and take off running. The heat radiating off of him was profound; another minute in that tiny kiln and he might've burst into flame.

“It's a fine night,” said Dennis, bending over and seeking out the hose. Turning on the tap, he quickly turned and sprayed Ulrich full-force in the face.

The investigator shrieked as the frigid water met his hot skin. An intense dizziness hit him like a freight train and muddled his vision with black spots. Within a few moments however, as the initial shock subsided, he regained control of his body and found that the cool spray actually felt good. The immense heat was sapped from his skin and things gradually returned to normal. By the time Dennis turned the spray on himself, Ulrich was feeling surprisingly energized. It was like he'd just wandered out of an hours-long fever.

Somehow, the way forward was clearer than it had been only an hour before. In the morning, he'd meet up with Sister Ruth, tie off his loose ends with Jerome and, possibly, figure out what'd really happened in the Sick House. Aside from fulfilling his contract with the client, he'd see if he couldn't settle the business of the infirmary, simultaneously freeing McArthur from the specter of its sordid history. He'd find out what really happened there and how, if at all, it was related to the death of Dr. Klein. Someone had killed and buried the man, using the building and its awful legacy as a cover. Maybe the killer had wished the place's reputation would keep people from investigating the crime in earnest.

They'd made a critical error, however. They hadn't counted on Harlan Ulrich being on the case.

For the first time in his career, he wasn't just going to take the easy way out. When he put his mind to something, really committed to a cause, he was unstoppable. And whoever had killed the doctor would be learning this the hard way. No amount of frightful myth could deter him from his investigation. The Sick House was a fearful place; he knew it first-hand. But whoever or whatever was responsible for this crime would be found out. And, just maybe, he'd be able to sort out the facts from the rumors and settle the infirmary's reputation once and for all.

Mentally and physically he felt refreshed. Thanking Dennis for the information, he hobbled off to room four, his clothes bunched up under his arm, where he started immediately for the shower. Then, after guzzling a good deal of water at the bathroom sink, he dropped into bed, sleeping like a rock till morning when the sunlight peeking through the blinds saw him awaken.

Chapter 19

On his way to breakfast the next morning, Ulrich removed his Sinatra CD from the stereo and decided to give the local radio stations a try. He only succeeded in finding one, which was playing a grainy old Conway Twitty number. Tapping along with the beat on the steering wheel, he drove the familiar route to Milo's, pulling into the same parking spot he'd done the previous day and stepping into the restaurant feeling refreshed and relaxed. The hostility of the locals wouldn't bother him today; now that he understood why they loathed outsiders, he was feeling sympathetic. Really, he couldn't blame them, and would instead try to prove them wrong by succeeding in his investigation.

First things first, however. He needed to eat. There could be no progress on an empty stomach. The sauna the night before had left him curiously famished, but the sleepiness that'd overtaken him afterward had won out and prevented him from seeking out a late-night snack. His stomach groaned loudly as he entered the restaurant, the metal door closing behind him with a great smack. His entrance drew the attention of the staff and patrons once more, but this time he knew better than to dwell on it. Without invitation, he strolled quietly to the same booth he'd sat in the day before and sat down.

Some minutes later, and following the eruption of some hushed conversation throughout the place, the unfriendly waitress walked up to his table and brought coffee and water.

Without looking up at her frowning face, Ulrich lackadaisically turned the menu this way and that in his hands, ordering the breakfast platter and cheeseburger once again. He also added a side of apple pie and an extra order of sausage links a la carte.

This enormous order seemed to amuse the waitress, who asked him with an arched brow, “You expecting company to help you eat all that? That's too much food for a skinny fella like you.”

Ulrich looked up at her, taking a sip of the miserable coffee. “Matter of fact, I'm a stress-eater,” he deadpanned. “Got a long day ahead of me and I need my energy.” Setting down his mug, he stopped the waitress as she attempted to head into the kitchen with his order. “One question.”

She looked back at him, corners of her mouth creased into a frown.

“Any idea where Lancaster Street's at? I'm looking for the church.”

***

By the time he made it to the church on Lancaster Street, a modest little thing with a steeple and room enough for perhaps thirty or forty congregants at a time in its pews, Ulrich felt like he needed to be carried out of the driver's seat. His stomach was full to bursting with diner food, and he was some minutes in pacing around the SUV before he could finally rummage up the energy to enter the church.

Ulrich wasn't a church-goer, but had been to enough weddings and funerals to know that this place was mighty small by any standard. Three pairs of long, wooden pews sat at the center of the room just before the pulpit. There wasn't any mass going on at the moment when he thrust open the door, and save for the small, crooked figure of a nun in prayer in the row nearest the altar, the building appeared completely empty.

Stepping forth quietly, Ulrich cleared his throat, drawing the attention of the wizened old nun and summoning up a warm smile. “I don't suppose you're sister Ruth?”

The old woman grunted as she stood up from the kneeler. Brushing off the front of her black habit, she adjusted her veil and nodded. “That's right. How may I help you this morning, sir? I'm afraid you're early for mass; our first service isn't for another two hours yet.”

“That's very good,” replied Ulrich. “I suppose that means you've got a bit of time to chat with me, then?” Standing beside her, the investigator was stricken by how slight the woman was. Her bent, arthritic hands, which she held at waist-level, appeared child-like in size. Though Ulrich was a tall man, the nun was positively dwarfed by him in every aspect. “You see, I'm a private investigator and I've been hired to look into a certain local disappearance. I was hoping I might ask you some questions.”

Sister Ruth cocked her head to the side, something of the local disdain entering into her features where previously only an enfeebled placidness had dwelt. “I don't think I can help you,” her voice lowered in a croak. “If you're talking about Dr. Klein, then I can't really tell you anything more than anyone else in town can.”

Ulrich grinned. “Well, it isn't the doctor that I'm interested in specifically. Not in this particular case. Rather, I was hoping that you might have a few minutes to discuss the Sylvan Infirmary, in nearby Moonville.”

This put something of a scare into the woman, and she threw out one of those slight hands to grip at the pew. Steadying herself, her gaze dropped to the stony floor at once. She was searching, it was quite clear, for a reason, any reason, not to participate in this interview. “Now, why would you wish to know about that old place, and why, of all people, would you want to ask me about it?”

“Because I have good reason to believe that the Sisters of Mercy ran the infirmary, and that you're affiliated with them. Or, have I been misled?”

Sister Ruth shook her head.

“I am told by a local source that you're perhaps the last surviving member of the order that worked at the infirmary. Is that the case?”

At this, the nun nodded almost imperceptibly. Ulrich had hitherto asked only simple questions; he hadn't even inquired yet after the level of her involvement in running the place. It was clear that she knew things and that she was hesitant to divulge them, however. Ulrich appraised her narrowly, wondering if she was hesitant to speak due to some sense of guilt. Maybe Dennis was right, he thought. Maybe the nuns there really did do awful things to the patients at the infirmary. And maybe she's clamming up because she took part in it.

“I'm not a cop,” he added, hoping to help things along. “Anything you tell me is strictly confidential. I'm not trying to get anyone in trouble here. I just want some answers that'll help me in my investigation.”

Unexpectedly, Sister Ruth smirked. She walked out of the pew and led the way to the main door, slowly pushing it open and leading Ulrich out into the morning sunlight. “You misunderstand, sir,” she said after a time, looking up to the canopy of a large tree and crossing her arms. “No court on Earth can put a scare in me; I am accountable only to God. I can talk to you about the infirmary if you wish, but not here. If you'll come with me, just a short way, then perhaps I can put on some tea for us. Please understand that it is not a pleasant subject, however. Working in such conditions was trying.” Before leading him off in the direction of a small one-story house some two-hundred or so yards from the church, she added, “And before I consent to doing so, I'd like to be clear on your intentions. Why do you want to know about the infirmary, and how will it help you in your investigation, Mr...?”

“Ulrich. Harlan Ulrich.” He extended a hand to shake, but Sister Ruth only returned with a nod. He continued, “A body was found on the grounds recently. Moreover, I had an... experience there. I would be lying if I said there wasn't a personal aspect to this questioning. I just want to know more about what went on there from someone who actually lived it. I feel that more background will help me connect the dots.”

“A body.” The sister mulled this over for a time. “So, that's what this is about.” She nodded, then waved him over, leading him to the small house. “We have much to discuss.”

Chapter 20

Sister Ruth served up a piping hot cup of Earl Grey to her guest, but didn't bother to fix herself any. Her home, a small one-story house, was very austerely adorned from what Ulrich could tell. It boasted at most two bedrooms, and the furniture in the living room, mostly second-hand store rescues, had seen better days. The mug she handed him was an old one, an off-white color. Once there'd been a slogan dashed across it in a cheesy font, but one too many washings had left it faded.

Ulrich wasn't much for tea, not compared to coffee, but accepted the mug nonetheless and thanked her for it. He tugged on the tea bag, watching the tea steep for a time as Sister Ruth sat in the ragged wingback chair across from his own. A religious magazine, a rosary, were found on the chipped-up coffee table between them. The nun glanced at them with some degree of longing, like she wished to pick them up and avoid the conversation that was coming, but instead she knotted her veiny hands between her knees and drew in a deep breath. It was a breath of resignation, the kind of breath that said, “You've got me where you want me. Go ahead and ask me anything.”

That was thing thing, though; Ulrich hadn't shown up at her door demanding answers or intending to make her feel as though she were a suspicious character with something to hide. He was only there because he wanted to learn more about the Sick House, to hear about what it was like from someone who'd actually been there, and to see if he couldn't make a little more sense out of his strange and frightening encounter. The quiet nun, however, had begun acting suspiciously from the onset, like she had something to hide. Ulrich couldn't put his finger on it; he didn't think that the old woman was in any way involved with Dr. Klein's murder, but he didn't like her timidity. He decided to tread lightly, gather what he could by making her feel at ease, lest she clam up. With a big slurp of tea, he thanked her again and set down the mug on the table, crossing his legs and toying with the back of his pant leg. “Thank you for seeing me today, Sister. I hope that this isn't an inconvenience to you. I know that you have mass today, and I promise not to take too much of your time. My most recent case, however, has brought me to the Sylvan Infirmary, and while investigating there, I had a--”

“An incident,” she interjected before he could even form the words.

Ulrich nodded. “I take it you know what I mean, then?”

Sister Ruth shuddered, and tears seemed to rush to the corners of her eyes, but the nun firmed up and sucked in a breath. “I had some idea that you would be coming today. Or, at least, it doesn't surprise me. They always reach out when they wish to make a connection. They must have wanted me to talk to you, Mr. Ulrich. That's the only reason that they reached out to me last night, I think.”

“I don't follow...” began the investigator, arching a brow.

When Sister Ruth slowly drew up both sleeves of her habit and displayed her pale forearms, both of them marked in jet black handprints not unlike the one he himself had worn not so long ago, he suddenly understood however.

The nun continued. “When the spirits of that infirmary want to talk-- and I assure you that there are a lot of them-- they have a way of reaching out and leaving their mark. Something came to me in the night. I saw it in my dreams.” She tugged her sleeves down and looked wide-eyed at Ulrich. “I'm going to talk to you, to tell you whatever you wish to know. It's what the spirits seem to want. You've seen them too, haven't you?”

Ulrich chuckled incredulously at first, scaling through his memory and wondering if, in fact, he'd really seen otherworldly things during his visits to the infirmary. It still felt irrational to admit it; he wanted to attribute those episodes to something else, anything but forces outside of nature. But ultimately, he nodded. “I had one of those handprints, too. It faded away, but... something in that building touched me while I was poking around. I don't know what it was. Couldn't quite tell, though it was frightening. Another time, I saw a woman walking out on the grounds. I still don't know what to make of it. The place really is haunted, then?”

“If any place on Earth is haunted, it's the Sylvan Infirmary,” she replied. “So many people died there, Mr. Ulrich. Before I was even born, people were dying there. It is a place marked by death, and it has an appetite for it. Before we continue this chat, I must recommend, strongly, that you refrain from revisiting the place.”

Ulrich grinned. “That isn't a promise I can necessarily keep, though I do appreciate your concern.”

Displeased by this reply, Sister Ruth gave a little wave of her hands. “Well, what is it you wish to know about the place?”

Still hoping to keep things light and friendly, Ulrich cracked a grin. “Well, so the place is haunted. But I've heard some other outlandish stories-- supposedly there was a killer nun who worked there years back?”

At this, any trace of calm was immediately drained from the old woman's face, and she slumped forward a touch, like she'd just had the wind knocked out of her. She was quick in recovering, pursing her lips and dabbing at her brow, which was reddening. “No,” she muttered. “That's... that's...” She took a tremulous breath and then leveled her eyes on the investigator, seeming to silently plead with him. She didn't want to discuss this, it was all too clear, and doing so was putting a great strain on her.

“It isn't true, is it?” asked Ulrich, dropping the amusement in exchange for concern.

She shook her head fervently. “No. No, that was a rumor that started... you see, when you have a place like that infirmary, where so many people die, and where rumors of unsavory practices are many, it's only natural that the staff should be implicated. That story, though, of the supposed 'killer nun', came from a number of rumors, all of them coalescing into one fabulous lie. Chiefly, it spread due to the disappearance of one nun, my friend Astrid, who went missing in the late 50's.”

“So,” interrupted Ulrich, taking out his notepad and jotting down a few notes in black ballpoint, “you mean to tell me that the place was open even after being shut down by authorities?” He already knew this to be the case. He just wanted to hear her say it.

“Oh, yes,” she admitted. “It's true that we continued doing work there. Only a few of us remained; the elder sisters of our order worked mainly in and around the church, here in McArthur. Some of us, though, the younger ones with less experience, would still work in the Sick House. Sister Margaret, who was in charge of the order in those days, had worked out some sort of agreement with the diocese, forged some paperwork, in order to keep the funding going. She was adamant that the infirmary needed to stay open, and that the facilities in McArthur were not sufficient to care for all of the infirm in the area. Some, in fact, were too sick to make the transfer; short of killing them, what were we supposed to do? Just leave them to rot in that old building? So many of them suffered on for years. We did the best we could for them, and the diocese seemed to understand the work we were doing. Sister Margaret was acquainted with the Archbishop as I understand it, and a certain deal was reached. The funds kept coming, albeit in lower amounts than before, and the operation would continue without the State's knowledge. Even back then Moonville was an abandoned ghost town. It wasn't as though we were worried that health inspectors or the like might show up for a tour. It was out of the way, well-hidden and relatively difficult to access. And considering its reputation as a place of death and disease, people knew to stay away.”

“I see.” Ulrich was pleased to finally talk with someone who'd worked there. Much of his research was being borne out now by the old nun's accounts, and he urged her on. “So, this friend of yours that went missing?”

“Her name was Astrid. Astrid Baker. She, too, was a nun. The youngest of our order. She'd been assigned to work as a caretaker at the infirmary during those latter years, along with me and another sister, Lydia, who has since passed on.”

As Ulrich wrote down the name, something struck him about it. He narrowed his gaze, tracing the letters over and over again until he finally made the connection. Astrid Baker... A.B. The note Dr. Klein received urging him to visit the Sick House had been signed with the initials “A.B.”. He licked his lips, circling the name numerous times. Astrid Baker had just nudged her way onto the list of suspects in this case. It was an a-ha moment. He felt like some long-elusive piece of the puzzle had just fallen into place. It was too early to say how she might be involved yet, and he did his best to restrain his excitement at the connection, but the presence of the woman's initials on the note was compelling. He looked to Sister Ruth expectantly, eager to learn more.

Ruth cleared her throat, clutching at the armrests as she went on, her face crinkling in a painful reminisce. “Near the end, before the place was shuttered for good, the Sisters had us doing a rotation; there was only ever one of us on duty. There was talk back then that parts of Moonville might be reinvigorated, land bought for the construction of businesses or the like. This never came to pass, but the Sisters wanted to keep things especially discrete in case developers did come through. It was a heavy workload in those days; we had minimal training and even more minimal equipment.

“Working the infirmary solo was miserable, but we did the best we could. Sometimes, we'd get a little help in the way of medical students from the nearby universities; Sister Margaret was willing to invite them so that they might gain a little experience. Usually they were vetted by some process-- I can't recall how. I think that they were associated with the archbishop or other higher-ups, referred by someone connected with the diocese. Anyhow, the acuity of those patients was enormously high, so that it would make a phenomenal training ground for a novice physician. Of course, the conditions there, and the lack of proper equipment, made it very hard for them, but all of us Sisters were very happy for the extra help when we could get it.”

“And I take it Dr. Klein was brought in as one of those student physicians, then?”

Ruth nodded. “He was the last, in fact.”

Something about the way she said that word, last, made him uncomfortable enough to squirm in his chair.

She continued without invitation, her voice taking on a new, urgent energy. The words were flowing freely now; words that'd been dammed and held back for ages. It was clear that she'd kept all of this history to herself for far too long, and that she wanted to air it all out.

“I remember him back then,” she said. “He was a sharp kid, kind of cocky; but then, they all were. Those doctors thought they were God's gift to medicine, and some of them did great work, even under the circumstances. He worked there off and on, when his classes weren't too heavy, for nearly three months, as I recall. It was late autumn when...” She gulped, and just like that, the tap was shut off.

“When...?” asked Ulrich, leaning forward in his chair and waving his notepad in the air.

“There was an accident,” she said, starting off after a brief reverie. “We had one patient, a middle-aged man, who'd been seriously ill for a long while. In fact, he shouldn't have made it, the tuberculosis should have ruined him, but he made a miraculous recovery. He'd been too sick to transfer out of the infirmary to McArthur-- the trip might've literally killed him. That's how ill he was. But, over time, his health coalesced and he was on his way to being released.”

Ulrich furrowed his brow. His crossed legs quaked in anticipation, his planted foot hammering out a nervous cadence on the shabby rug. “So, what happened to him?”

Sister Ruth sighed. “Well, one evening, in late autumn-- I can't recall the day-- he was to be dosed with a medicine. An antibiotic, or pain medicine. It's been a long time, so please forgive me if I can't remember exactly. Dr. Klein administered medications all the time, had access to simple painkillers and the like through his university, and often carried a large case of them during his rounds at the infirmary. Well, anyway, he was skilled for a student, but he wasn't above making mistakes. And in medicine, sometimes, even small mistakes can be incredibly costly.” She paused. “I think you can see where I'm going with this.”

“Go on.”

“During that instance, Dr. Klein accidentally gave too much of the medication, overdosed the patient. By the time he realized what he'd done, it was already too late. The patient ended up in a deep coma and never awoke. They were dead by nightfall, and nothing the doctor could do would bring them back.” Ruth had gathered up bunches of her habit in each hand, and looked on the verge of tears. Her veil quaked as she went on. “He killed him. It was an accident,” she added with a shake of her finger. “I can promise you that. It was an amateurish mistake, a serious one, but a mistake nevertheless. He never intended to kill the man, least of all when he was so near to recovering, and I can't tell you how badly it affected the doctor. Dr. Klein was inconsolable, and we all knew that this was the kind of error that could ruin a bright future like his. First of all, a State investigation into the death would bring attention to the goings-on at the Sick House. We'd be shut down, for good this time, and the Sisters would likely end up on trial. Dr. Klein stood to lose his license before he'd even fully earned it. And on top of all this, a man was dead. An innocent man, who might've been released after another month of care. It was a mess. A horrible mess, for all involved.”

Ulrich massaged his jaw. “So, he killed someone. Never saw that coming.”

Again, Ruth was quick to interject. “He did it accidentally! It was a beginner's mistake. His nerves had been shot, his focus ruined!”

“Oh?” Ulrich arched a brow. “So, I take it you were there when this accident took place?”

Ruth went pale, sinking back into her seat. Her lips seemed to tremble as she slowly shook her head. “No. Only Dr. Klein and Astrid were there at the time. Astrid called me, and I came after the fact. The patient had already passed by the time I got there. They felt it best not to tell any of the other Sisters, or to involve the authorities, until they were sure nothing more could be done for the fellow.”

This little story was beginning to smell really fishy to the investigator, who pressed on despite Ruth's obvious reticence. “OK, so you weren't there. But you're so sure it was an accident? Why is that?” He cleared his throat. “You said that the doctor was unfocused. Why? What had him so distracted that he'd kill a guy during his rounds?”

“Well,” began Ruth, “Astrid told me that the man had made a comment to the doctor shortly before being dosed, and that the doctor had been agitated by it. This probably caused him to make the error in his calculations that led to the overdose.” She hesitated, kneading her hands so tightly that the prominent veins looked on the verge of bursting like blue balloons. “The two of them worked there alone much of the time. I suppose that the patient thought this was inappropriate, because he insinuated that he and Astrid-- a nun, I remind you-- were carrying on some sort of illicit affair during their shifts at the infirmary.”

“And? Was that true?”

Ruth bounced up, hands clutching the armrests. She looked offended, like Ulrich had just walked over to the wooden crucifix hanging on the wall near the door and snapped it over his knee. “Absolutely not. The Sisters of Mercy take their vows very seriously, and Astrid was no exception. But that was what the man said, and it apparently upset Dr. Klein very much. It was a hateful thing to say, and you can imagine how a rumor of that kind could ruin both their reputations. Those were far more conservative times, Mr. Ulrich. Such a thing being falsely spouted would have incensed the doctor, perhaps made it hard to focus.”

Ulrich fought back a grin. Maybe, but killing the guy with a medication overdose is an easy way to keep that little gem from ever escaping the confines of the Sick House if it's true. Dead men tell no tales, after all. “What was the man's name? The patient, who was killed?”

Ruth was some time in replying, and when she finally did, it wasn't with a name. “That particular patient was a John Doe. He'd been homeless prior to his admission, and we knew next to nothing about him. He went by the nickname 'Teddy', but that was all we knew. He had no next of kin that we knew of, either.”

Yep. This was getting scummier and scummier every minute. Folding his hands over his lips, Ulrich nodded. “And what happened after all of that? Teddy died and the three of you had a pow-wow in the Sick House. Then?”

That was when the tears started in earnest. Ruth couldn't hold it back any longer, and continued between gasping sobs. “I'm not going to say I'm proud of how we handled it, but to us, it seemed like the only way at the time. Teddy's body... we stashed it away down in the tunnels beneath the building. Most of the buildings out in Moonville feature tunnels. They linked the town together in the old days, and it seemed like the kind of place no one would ever look. We stashed the body there and never went public, because we knew what might happen if we did. Me and Astrid, well, we told Sister Margaret, but only because she would know one of the patients was missing. Fearing legal trouble should it come out, she arranged to move the remaining patients to a care facility outside McArthur to keep from attracting local attention and we left the Sylvan Infirmary for good. Some of them didn't make it, as we'd predicted. They'd been too ill for the transfer. But to do otherwise, to involve the authorities, would have been to wreck Dr. Klein's bright future. We all agreed that this would be an awful thing. The whole incident had been a mistake, after all. A terrible mistake. Should the young doctor, inexperienced as he was, be forced to pay for that mistake his whole life? To throw away everything he'd worked so hard for?”

“Some would say yes,” offered Ulrich.

Ruth clammed up, looking deflated, and stewed in silence for a time. She'd gotten it all off of her chest, and looked positively miserable. Though an old woman, Ruth looked as though she'd aged another decade. Her eyes were red, sunken, and her feeble features quaked with every labored sob.

“You say Astrid disappeared. Where did that happen in relation to all of this, and where do you think she went?”

Drying her tears, Ruth shrugged. “I don't know. I think that she ran off, the guilt of the thing being too much for her. She was a sensitive, kind girl. I imagine she left for Columbus or some other large city and just carved out a new life. She disappeared not long after that incident. A few weeks later, I believe. Dr. Klein had already gone off to complete his residency at OSU. As for me, I worked under Sister Margaret here at the church from that day on.”

“Well, I've got one thing to say about all of this,” muttered Ulrich, standing up and pacing a short distance across the living room. He picked up his mug, the tea having cooled greatly, and took a loud sip. “Your buddy Teddy is still in there, somewhere, and I think I've met him.” He met Ruth's wide gaze. “I was poking around the Sick House and encountered something. It reached out to me, touched me, and left one of those handprints. It must've wanted to get through to me somehow, perhaps tell me about what you three had done to him. And now that I know-- now that someone on the outside knows what happened to him-- perhaps his spirit can rest in peace.”

“Maybe so,” she mumbled, pawing at her cheeks. “It was a great sin on our part, and we may well pay for it. What's done is done, however. It's in God's hands.”

That felt like such a cop out. Perhaps Ruth was right, and it was in God's hands, though Ulrich knew he could likely tip off the authorities and have the old nun locked up for the rest of her days. Helping stash a body, even if it was decades ago, definitely qualified as a serious crime. Still, at that moment, he had other things to worry about. This compelling lead of his, Astrid Baker, had gone missing. The note Dr. Klein had received led him to believe that she was still out there somewhere. Perhaps she'd sent the doctor that note in the hopes of meeting up with him at the infirmary.

And then there was the fact that the good doctor, beloved by all, had quite the skeleton in his closet. Swell guy that he was, he'd accidentally killed a patient as a student-- and the “accidental” part of that was still up for question. Instead of coming clean and facing the consequences for his actions, he and some nuns had stashed the body away like a sack of garbage in the tunnels beneath the Sick House. It was particularly twisted, because everyone he'd spoken to had been adamant about how kind and noble a man Dr. Klein had been. What would Jerome think, knowing that his uncle had been a killer?

The doctor's body had been found on the site, so perhaps he'd gotten his comeuppance in the end. But who'd done it? Who'd killed him, and why? Someone who'd known about the “medication error” so many years ago? Astrid and Sister Ruth here both seemed mighty suspicious, but he couldn't rule out that someone else had learned of the incident during the past few decades and sought revenge against the doctor. A previously unknown relative of Teddy's, perhaps?

Suddenly things were making a bit more sense. Where before Ulrich couldn't imagine any reason for the doctor's return to the abandoned infirmary, he now had something to work with. Maybe Astrid, or someone else who knew about the incident, had baited him out there. For all he knew, it was Sister Ruth, who sat across from him at that very moment, sweating bullets. He tried to picture it: So, Dr. Klein gets this note, signed by Astrid Baker, who ran off after the incident fifty-odd years ago. Maybe she's feeling guilty about it, wants to come clean and let everyone know about what really happened that day. Can't live with her guilty conscience anymore after all of these years. And Dr. Klein, knowing what's up, goes to meet her there. But when he arrives, they fight, and Astrid kills him, buries him where she hopes no one will ever look. And then she fades away again.

Nothing was certain, but this seemed as likely an explanation as any.

Ulrich cleared his throat, thanking Sister Ruth for her time. “I think that's enough for today. I might be back some other time with more questions.” He nodded and slowly started for the door. All the while, the nun didn't move an inch, simply leaning back in her seat and appearing pale, defeated.

***

While running through everything he'd just learned and coming up with new theories, Ulrich felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. Pulling it out, he found it was Officer Mark calling. The SUV idled in the church parking lot as he answered. “Hello?”

“Hey, Mr. Ulrich?” began the officer, his voice tinged with something like nervousness.

“Yeah?”

“It's Officer Mark Dennison, State Highway Patrol?”

Ulrich chuckled. “I know the one. What's going on?”

Officer Mark hesitated. “Well, uh, it's a little early yet for the forensics to come back on those remains we found yesterday. But our guy had a look at them and found a few interesting details that I thought I might share.” His voice dropped noticeably. “This is strictly off the record, though. It's not really the kind of thing that I should be blabbing about. It's relevant to your case, though, and I don't think anyone would mind too much, considering the nature of these finds.”

“Out with it, then!” Ulrich was growing impatient, leaning the seat back and staring up at the dome light in the car ceiling.

“Those remains,” began the officer, “they don't belong to Dr. Klein.”

Ulrich shot upright, holding onto the wheel and straightening out his seat in a hurry. “What?”

“Yeah. They aren't his bones.”

“Well, who the hell do they belong to, then?”

Mark gulped. “Well, that's the thing. We don't know yet. But our guy was able to tell us a little bit about them. First off, they're old. Decades old. And it looks like they're the remains of a female. Young, probably twenties or thirties.”

The investigator grit his teeth. Female remains, decades-old? He knew better than to read too deeply into that, but his mind was reeling already with the possibilities. “I see.”

“And that's not all.”

Chuckling incredulously, Ulrich slapped the wheel. “Oh, and what else could there possibly be?”

“There are some other bones mixed in there with Jane Doe's remains. Thought it was another body entirely, but... it looks like the victim was pregnant when she died. Wasn't far along, but those bones in there are a baby's, no doubt.”

Son of a bitch. Ulrich was speechless for a time.

“Y-you still there?”

“Yeah.” Staring out the windshield at the outside of the church, he noticed a few well-dressed townsfolk ambling in. “Thanks for the call,” he added.

“So, what'll you do now?” asked Mark. “I guess that kind of throws a wrench in your investigation, eh?”

There was really only one thing for him to do, of course. “I'm going to have to go back to the infirmary, obviously. I've come upon a few details that I can't ignore. And the Sick House is at the center of things. I have to go back.” He looked to the clock on the dash. “It's early yet. I'll probably head back to the hotel and gather my things. And get lunch. After that, I'll have to stop by and poke around in that miserable old place. May as well do it while there's still some light out, though.”

“Whoa, now,” interjected Mark. “Can't let you do that. That place is closed to outsiders, a crime scene after what we found last time. I'm sorry, but I can't allow it.”

Ulrich shook his head. “So, will you come and arrest me, then? You know where to find me, after all.”

The officer stammered a response, but fell silent.

“And I don't suppose your department has men posted there to keep people out, do they?”

Silence.

“That's what I thought. If you feel the need to lock up a hardened law-breaker like me, you know where to find me,” said Ulrich with seasick amusement. He hung up.

Chapter 21

Siegfried Klein had killed once; had he killed twice?

That was the chief question on Ulrich's mind as he pulled into the Hotel Acardi's narrow lot and hopped out. The remains he and Mark had found outside of the Sick House hadn't been those of Dr. Klein after all. He felt secure that they belonged to Astrid Baker, the “missing” nun, who'd helped Klein and Ruth stash Teddy's body so many years ago at the infirmary. Moreover, the fetal remains found in the grave were likely those of Klein's and Astrid's child. There was probably something to the rumor that the doctor and Sister Astrid had had a fling after all. Dr. Klein might've killed that patient, Teddy, because he knew about it. In fact, it's probable. The doctor's overdosing of the patient had been framed as a complete accident by Ruth, but Ulrich now had reason to believe that it'd been anything but.

He didn't want to jump to conclusions, to let his mind run away from him. Up to this point, he'd run a shoddy investigation, and was somewhat ashamed of himself. From the very first day he'd stumbled into McArthur things had gone poorly. He'd walked into the Sick House without thinking, had gotten spooked there, only to get the runaround from everyone in town. All of the information he'd gained in the past few days had served to confuse the crap out of him. This was the first time in this investigation that he really had a strong working theory, the very first time he could claim to be in control of things.

And the only way for him to verify his hypotheses would be to return to that wretched infirmary in the woods of Moonville.

All of his information was pointing to the body of this patient, Teddy, which was supposedly stashed away in the tunnels beneath the infirmary. Something told him that if he sought out this body, he'd find what he was looking for. At this point, he wasn't even certain what he was looking for, but all of the momentum he'd hitherto gained was pushing him towards this inevitable search beneath the Sick House. Dr. Klein, or proof of his return to the Sick House, would probably be there. This was the next step, the only natural progression for the case.

Of course, that didn't stop him from being scared shitless.

He rounded the corner of the Hotel Acardi, rifling through his pocket for the keys to his room. He wanted to gather up his things and load them into the SUV in case he had to leave McArthur in a hurry. As he turned however, he spied a short, black-haired woman standing outside his door, smoking. Her mane of blackish-silver hair was wildly disheveled, and her stubby nose was stained red in the hues of the drunkard. Her eyes were heavy, giving the impression of prolonged sleeplessness, and at sighting him, she dropped her cigarette and stamped it out in a hurry.

He knew who she was before she staggered forward and introduced herself.

Combing a lock of tangled hair aside, she sniffed at the air and folded her arms over her ill-fitting white T-shirt. It was a long thing, several sizes too big, and stained with dirt. “H-hello,” she said, her voice rough. “My name is Ramona Willis.” She held out her hand to shake, and Ulrich took it gingerly. “Y-you're, uh... Mr. Ulrich, right? The detective?”

He nodded slowly.

“I wanted to talk to you, sir,” she said, a cough following shortly thereafter. Her voice was positively grating, deepened by years of chain smoking. Her skin was grooved and discolored, with splotches of yellow throughout. That she was unwell was all too clear. Years of drinking and smoking had left her in a sorry state.

“Sure, what about?” asked Ulrich, crossing his arms.

“Dennis told me you were staying in this room,” she said, nodding towards the door. “Can we talk inside, please?” She glanced at the rest of the building, as if half-expecting to find someone hanging out of one of the windows, listening.

He didn't like the idea of inviting the woman inside, and wasn't completely sure he could trust her. He was in a hurry and didn't care to have a widely-known drunk slow him down with her nonsense. Nevertheless, he pulled the keys from his pocket and unlocked the door, waving her in. “I'm in something of a hurry,” he said as he closed the door behind them and made a beeline for his valise. “I hope this won't take long.” Even from across the room he could smell the cigarette smoke on her. She was a living, breathing ashtray.

Swaying nervously at the door, she nodded and looked up at the ceiling, her breathing shaky. “I, uh, left you a note. Jerome told me you were coming, that you might wanna talk to me, and I knew you'd be stayin' here as it's the only place in town.” She licked her lips.

“Yes,” replied Ulrich flatly. “I got your note.” He pulled his coat down from its perch on the closet door and began batting off the remaining clods of mud on its sleeves.

“You must absolutely stay out of Moonville-- stay away from that terrible place, Mr. Ulrich,” she pleaded.

Why? Because I might discover what a monster your former employer was? He held his tongue. “Thank you for your concern, but my investigation isn't over just yet. I have yet to find Dr. Klein, and have reason to believe that the infirmary may hold some clues. I'm headed there shortly.”

She gasped, her legs quaking like they were about to give way. Her large, yellowish eyes were dressed up in tears and she shook her head. “Please, don't go. Mr. Ulrich, nothing good can come from such a place. It's unsafe there, and besides, enough people have died there. Don't let it claim you, too. It's a godless place, that whole accursed town is.”

“Again, I appreciate your concern, but if you've come to dissuade me, I'm afraid you're too late.” He zipped up his valise and threw his coat over his shoulder. “If that's all, then I must ask you to leave.”

As if she hadn't heard him, Ramona started into a quiet monologue. “He got another one of those notes in the mail about a month ago. I tell you,” she said, twitching uncomfortably, her eyes narrowing in a wince, “he'd always get so angry, worked up, when one of those showed up. I dunno who sent 'em, except that, some mornings, he'd find 'em stuck in the door jamb. Someone must've been dropping them off, and the reaction was always the same. He'd toss them out and be in one of his moods for days. He got them more than a few times over the years, most often in those months before winter, and I never knew what to make of it. But this time, he got one, and he really lost it.” She shuddered. “That morning, he found the note, and he made a real mess of the house. He told me he was sick of it, that he was going to go out there and take care of it once and for all. Now, I don't pretend to know what he was fixing to 'take care' of, but he said he was going to put a stop to 'it', and that he'd suffered long enough, and that he couldn't let this go.

“The doctor was a calm man, a sweet man, in all those years I knew him. But when one of these notes turned up he was another person. The note was always the same. Always the same. Always tellin' him to come to the Sick House, and they were always signed the same, too. Someone, 'A.B.', wanted him to go there, to check on a patient, but we all know round here that there ain't no one left in the old Sick House these days. I don't know who that was, or what it meant to him, but he was always so angry when they turned up. And this last time, well, he really flew off the deep end. He said he was going there, and that he was going to 'handle it'. That morning, when he took off, was the last time I saw him.”

Ulrich cocked his head to the side. From his notebook, he pulled out the yellowed note Jerome had given him. “Wait a minute, you mean to say that he was in the habit of receiving notes like this one?” He handed it to her. “Notes asking him to come to the Sick House? As in, more than once? Over a period of years?”

She looked up at him, her hands shaking as she gave back the paper. “They were all like this one, exactly. He got 'em for years. I tell you, I worked for him a long time and as long as I've known him he's gotten these from time to time. And probably much longer.”

“Who was sending them? Did he ever say who 'A.B.' was?”

She shook her head. “He refused to talk about them, would get really sore if I ever asked questions. I learned to ignore them. But now I know. Someone, something, was drawing him to that evil place.” She tensed up, tears flowing freely now. “And whatever it was, it got him. It got him all because he decided to show up there.”

Ulrich was baffled by this. Someone had been sending the doctor notes like this one for years? That was the first he'd heard of it. He had no reason to doubt the housekeeper; though a drunk, she appeared earnest and concerned. Still, it made little sense. The only explanation he could think of was that someone had known about the killing decades past and had sent him the notes over the years as a sort of taunt, hoping to draw him back to the site and perhaps exact revenge. But who? All of the nuns involved with the Sick House were dead, except for Ruth, and though she had helped stash the body, Ulrich didn't think her capable of luring in the doctor and killing him. So, who was it? Who was responsible for this years-long campaign of harassment? Who else could have possibly known about Teddy's death? Astrid? No, she was dead, and if the preliminary examination of her remains was to be believed, had been for a very long time.

His head was spinning.

“Do you know anything else?” he pressed, reaching past her and opening the door to the room.

She shook her head. “He said he was going out there, to the Sick House, and then I never saw him again.” She dried her eyes.

Nodding solemnly, Ulrich motioned her out of the room and locked the door behind him. “Thank you for coming today.” Starting towards the rental office, he gave her a little wave as he left. “I'm afraid I must be going.”

Ramona's eyes plead with him, the crows feet at their corners teeming with fresh tears. She was sure that Ulrich was walking headlong into an insurmountable danger, a trap that would claim him like it had her employer. She uttered some faint warning as he walked off.

He didn't hear it, already having disappeared around the corner.

Chapter 22

The SUV was packed. He was coasting down the main road, keeping a lookout for one of those unmarked side streets he now knew would lead him to Moonville. He remembered his last trip to the Sick House and the route that Mark had supplied. Ulrich cranked up his stereo and listened to Sinatra belt out a fiery rendition of “My Way”.

He wasn't really listening, wasn't much admiring the crisp, even notes or the flourishes of the band like he usually did. The music was just an idle distraction, a little something to take the edge off. He felt like he was headed for the gallows, like he was walking straight into a landmine, and wanted to put the true purpose of his drive out of mind until the infirmary was in view.

The town was dressed in pleasant sunlight. Another nice day in the crumbling backwater of McArthur. The sunlight still didn't suit it; perhaps his impressions of the whole region had been colored by his first day there. That day, there'd been a terrible rainstorm. He remembered what it'd been like, driving through that mess on the disintegrating road. He'd stumbled through the mud, made a terrible mess of himself, and only barely made it to the Hotel Acardi with his wits in tow.

Despite having been in McArthur some days, Ulrich hadn't really explored the town much. He didn't feel especially driven to; there was nothing it could offer him and, besides, the bulk of its inhabitants weren't too fond of him. It was just as well. His business in this little town would be over after this trip. He'd enter the Sick House and poke around for a while. He'd either find something or he wouldn't, but either way, he recognized that this was probably the end of the road. Some trace of Dr. Klein was bound to show up in the building, in the subterranean structure where he and two nuns had stashed away a body so many years ago. Even if he couldn't find the man himself, there'd likely be enough evidence there to implicate him in Teddy's death. When he'd had his fill of the Sick House, he'd be all too happy to turn over what he knew to the authorities and let them take a crack at finding the doctor.

Perhaps, though, the doctor was waiting there for him.

The scenery shifted and the small town aesthetic gave way to woods of increasing density. This was it. He was climbing that hill on the roller coaster again. Very soon he'd be at the top, would be staring that Sick House, with its emotive windows, in the face again. He shuddered to think about it but kept going, cracking a window and letting a little fresh air into the stuffy vehicle. He turned up the music a little further, hoping to drown out his thoughts.

What if you find the doctor in there?

Or Teddy, if the doctor didn't get to his body first?

What will you do? Call the cops? Will they believe that Sister Ruth had a hand in hiding the body back then?

What will Jerome think of all this?

He sighed, the road falling away into dirt and gravel.

“Moonville, here I come.”

***

The Sick House came into view like an old friend, its dark brown paneling meeting his eye as the familiar byroad came up on the left. He gave the SUV a little gas, getting as close to the building as he could. It would be better that way; if things went to hell, he'd be able to sprint out of the joint and speed away.

Parking, Ulrich shut the door and leaned against the mud-flecked exterior for a time, taking in the oppressive quiet. He'd hoped to acclimate himself to it, that it wouldn't unsettle him, but it was futile. The breeze slowed down till it came through as a mere whisper. The birds in the trees seemed to hold their breaths. He wondered if they wouldn't come diving out of the canopy towards the building like they had the first time, and he almost took cover when an uncharacteristic rustling sounded from the treetops. When nothing emerged, he straightened his collar and surveyed the grounds.

There was no one else there; no cops, nothing, though traces of the frenzy there the previous day were still abundant in the form of footprints and tire tracks. He remembered the swarm of cops and police cruisers that'd filled the property then, and the way that he hadn't felt any more comfortable there even with them present. There was no power in numbers where the Sick House was concerned; a crowd might've assembled there, but the effect was the same. It was impossible not to feel alone, vulnerable, while in its vicinity.

Ulrich staggered forward, cell phone in hand. He wished he'd had the foresight to pick up a hardier flashlight, but figured it would suffice under the circumstances, so long as he didn't drop it this time. Anyhow, his mission was a simple one on its face. He wouldn't be stumbling through the building without an objective, just getting a feel for the layout. He'd be searching for a way into the cellar, for a way into the tunnels running under the building. He'd keep his eyes open along the way for anything incongruous, but ultimately his mission would begin in the underground. He'd be avoiding that stairwell where he'd been ambushed during his last tour and the whole of the upper story. Only the cellar and the space rumored to exist beneath it was of interest.

Rounding the corner, the front of the infirmary came into view. Lain across the front door, left slightly ajar, was a single strip of yellow caution tape. He chuckled to himself a little. What good is that going to do? Then again, he understood that no one in the area was dumb enough to mess around in the place; the yellow tape was likely more than enough to keep people out. Redundant, even. A formality. He frowned a little. As usual, you're the only one in this town without the sense to turn back. The only one who doesn't know better.

His breakfast welled up in his stomach. He could feel it climbing the rungs in his throat like a prisoner attempting a jailbreak. Ulrich patted on his chest, grimacing at the cloud of acid stewing, and started for the door of the building, trying hard not to look up into the black windows. Nothing good had ever come of staring into them, and as he advanced he felt more and more sure that he'd find something looking out at him if he did. His gaze was drawn to the surrounding woods, to the spot, blocked off by a small makeshift rope barrier, where the bones had been found. Recalling the misty specter he'd glimpsed out there, he wondered if it hadn't been Astrid. There was no way to know for sure, but he felt the odds were good. Astrid's just one of many spirits hanging around this old place. But why is she here?Did she want to reach out to me, too? To tell me something about her murderer, like Teddy did?

“Who buried you out here, Astrid?” he wondered aloud.

Though he had his suspicions, he wasn't sure he was ready for the answer just yet. The wind coursed through the trees, brushing past his ears and setting them twitching. The hairs on the back of his neck were caressed as if by invisible fingers, and he had to grit his teeth to keep from belching acid all over the overgrown lawn.

Standing before the door, in the calf-deep grass, Ulrich reached out and pulled away the caution tape. He folded it carefully, almost lovingly, and dropped it just inside the door, where it unfurled like a yellow snake. Sniffing the air, he pushed open the door further, its hinges groaning as if to welcome him back. The inside of the building was crowded with a punishing darkness. Had it really been this dark the last time he'd been inside, or had something changed in the interim? He assured himself it'd been this dark all along and took his first nervous step through the threshold.

The floorboards creaked beneath his boot.

Gulping, he stepped in with his other foot, officially leaving the outside world behind.

He was inside the Sick House now, and not for the first time. Just how big a fool was he? This was the kind of place that no one in their right mind would set foot in once, much less twice.

You never have been the sharpest, have you? he thought, gulping. His breakfast scrambled up his throat, reminding him of its presence with a hint of searing bile.

The flashlight setting on his phone was promptly switched on, allowing him to canvass the main room. He held it out before him, panning left to right, then right to left, slowly. The jumble of busted furniture, of ancient refuse, remained, though whether everything in the room was unchanged since his last visit his memory refused to commit. Pulled, as if by a vacuum, Ulrich ambled further in.

The door behind him squealed, closing slightly.

It's just the wind, he told himself.

Though, it might just as easily have been something else closing the door. An invisible doorman, maybe, hoping to trap the investigator inside. Ulrich remembered Mark's account of the place, his claim that, as a child, he'd wandered into the infirmary and seen a group of nebulous, human-shaped things crowding this very room. It wasn't exactly the best time for him to remember such an anecdote, but it filled his mind just the same as he scanned the room and threw up shadows on the ruined walls with his light.

He'd taken the door to the right last time, the door that led to the kitchen and to the upstairs. He shuddered for the remembrance, wondering if that grotesque, pale thing still lurked at the top of the stairwell. Maybe it'd been Teddy's spirit, unable to move on after Dr. Klein's terrible act. Maybe it'd been something else. Either way, he didn't want to know, and wouldn't be exploring the upstairs unless it was absolutely necessary. Instead, he'd be turning his attention to the lower level, to the cellar and the tunnels that ran beneath it.

It was hardly a more comforting prospect.

Sidling up to the door on the left of the main room, stepping gingerly over a pile of sodden leaves, Ulrich placed a hand against the cool metal sheeting and glanced through the opaque panel of glass. He expected to see something in it, a dark shape, a face or hand pressed to it. There was nothing there, however, save for darkness and possibility. Licking his lips, he carefully pushed at the door, finding it to open with surprising ease. It squealed, giving way to a dark room much in the spirit of the main one, with masses of broken furniture. In this space, close to the door, was a rusted bed frame, flanked by a large and curiously-shaped water stain on the adjacent wall. Something scurried across the floor, disappearing in a hurry into a divot in the base molding.

The investigator grasped his light carefully and edged his way into the room, letting the door close softly behind him. The room opened into a dark hallway.

“Well, here we go,” he mumbled. “Into the unknown.”

Chapter 23

The hallway was relatively clean when compared to the rest of the building he'd so far surveyed, though a thread of degradation still ran through its weather-beaten features. There was a marked shortage of water damage here, and the dust seemed thinner than it did in other spots. He fancied that it was due to increased foot traffic, perhaps recent, and the notion was redoubled when the creaking of the floorboards fed him the distinct impression of another presence at the far end of the unlit hallway. His light bobbed uneasily against the dusty, wooden floors until Ulrich could finally summon the courage to raise it.

If there had been anyone there, then they'd since gone. A sigh of relief was not forthcoming, however. The stuffy air clutched at the pockets in his lungs, made him want to cough and sneeze something awful. Breathing through his mouth, he found he could taste the air. It was the taste of an old, abandoned book; of a damp cemetery in autumn.

Ulrich paused, nearly hyperventilating, until he was certain it'd been his own advance that'd incited the floors to groan. Hey, don't panic, he thought. These floors are old, loose... they're bound to make a load of noise. They're not used to being walked on anymore.

Continuing through the hall at a snail's pace, he finally entered into a small room that featured a single door, along with a stairwell not unlike the one he'd seen near the kitchen during his previous visit. Both sides of the lower level terminated in stairways leading up to the upper story, by the looks of it. Uninterested in what the second story held however, Ulrich turned his attention to the door. His goal was in the guts of the old building, in the cellar. If there was a way into basement, and subsequently into the series of tunnels beneath the infirmary, then the door was likely it.

Ulrich shrank away from the door, with its wooden frame and brassy knob seeming to beckon him through the murk. Compared to every other wooden fixture he'd seen, this door looked somehow robust. It looked like something that'd persisted because it'd been tasked with holding some secret. Perhaps it was merely the outline of the thing, cast sharply in the sparse light of his phone that made it so, but Ulrich was reminded of the doors that sealed off the tombs of ancient pharaohs, and half-expected to find things etched into it. That something significant awaited him on the other side could not be denied.

He knew that every step forward, every corner turned, increased the probability of some awful discovery tenfold. The tunnels, wherever they were, were sure to contain at least one body-- that is, if Dr. Klein hadn't gotten to it first and hidden it away elsewhere. But what else might he find there, or on the way? Tensing up, he reached out and touched the doorknob, finding it uncomfortably cold. Unnaturally so. His palm was met with a cool wetness, like a thin layer of frost.

At the hushed count of three, he turned the knob and threw his light at the yawning darkness that opened up before him. A wave of chill air struck him and set him grasping for his collar. He wished he'd worn his coat; the mud on it didn't matter to him now. A set of stairs descending into some yet unseen hollow of darkness, and flanked on all sides by stone walls, roughly hewn, emerged from the murk.

This was it. The way to the cellar. To follow these stairs was to descend into the bowels of the infirmary.

Hesitating, Ulrich leaned into the open doorway just a touch, inspecting the uppermost stairs and wondering if the rickety-looking planks wouldn't disintegrate beneath his weight. As with all things in the Sick House, his descent carried with it some risk. He bit his lower lip and stuck out one foot gingerly, tapping the top of the first step and gripping the edge of the doorframe to keep his balance. The wood looked brittle, but until he was standing on it with his full weight there'd be no way to know whether he'd be supported.

The uppermost stair groaned, pleaded, creaked as he pressed, but didn't fall to bits straightaway as he'd expected.

Well, here goes nothing...

Mounting it with his full weight, he loosed a great sigh when it didn't suddenly disintegrate.

It was a little early for relief, however.

The second step, then the third, sagged beneath his feet as he continued. He clutched for anything that might serve as a support, his hand eventually finding the chill stone walls. The stonework here was very rough, calling to mind images of medieval dungeons carved directly into bedrock. He was descending into some primordial hovel, into some space that might precede the construction of the infirmary. Of humanity itself, perhaps. His fingers grazed the rough grooves where chisels had once worked the stone. Where the rest of the building might have been considered well-made and even handsome at one point, there was no doubt that the stony cellar had ever been anything but primitive.

The scent of moisture here was nigh overwhelming, far worse than it'd been anywhere else in the building. Something fast and many-legged dashed across his fingers as he grazed the wall, nearly sending him into a sprint down the remainder of the stairs. He cast his hand away and almost lost his balance, grinding to a halt at the midpoint of the ancient stairwell. Down below, rendered in the meager light, was the edge of a stone floor. These evidences of solid flooring were encouraging, and Ulrich carefully continued down the remainder of the stairs without touching the walls.

From below, accompanied by a chill, damp draft, he thought he heard a subdued laugh.

It was brief, so short-lived a sound that he couldn't be sure whether he'd actually heard it, or whether his ears had simply taken liberties with the sound of the subterranean breeze. But even if it had been a natural phenomenon, caused by the passage of the draft against some feature in the yet unexplored cellar, it was incredibly disquieting to the investigator. He felt disoriented by terror, his muscles tightening and refusing to work. An ambush felt imminent; someone or something was crouched around the corner, just out of sight, waiting to pounce on him like a bloodthirsty animal.

“H-hello?” he called out.

There was no response, save for a faint echoing of his own voice. It was like being in a venus fly-trap, maybe. The cold, filthy air didn't know what to do with his voice, muddling it and stifling it until it dissolved into discordant echoes. This was a place unaccustomed to any living human presence. To speak here was to shout in a tomb, to hear sounds as only the dead might hear them.

He continued.

The bottom step of the stairwell split down the middle as his foot landed upon it, but he didn't fall through or injure himself. Instead, hopping down onto the stone floor, Ulrich caught himself against the wall and quickly placed his back against it, showering the light from his phone all about his surroundings. The icy stone, apparently damp in places due to leaks from above, left his shirt wet and his skin burning with cold. It was only through a monumental effort that he let his shoulders drop and took in a deep, steady breath.

Don't forget why you're here. This is the end of the road, and it simply won't do to lose your cool. Not here. Somewhere down here you're going to find what you're looking for. Some proof of the doctor's whereabouts, or at least, of his misdeeds. You've got to stay calm. Don't lose your head. That's how mistakes happen. Just pretend this is like any other case. You're in a cellar, sure, but you're just looking to find the proof you'll need to wrap things up. It's business as usual. Imagine it's a seedy hotel, and you're peering into a window to take a snapshot of some guy boning his mistress...

Try as he might, it was impossible to imagine anything but the rough walls of uninviting stone that surrounded him.

He was in the underground now. If standing in the front room of the Sick House had made him feel dangerously isolated, then standing in its cellar made him feel like he'd been launched into outer space. The feeling of vulnerability, of stark terror here, was virtually incalculable, but with every step he took he massaged his worried mind with whatever reassurances he could conjure. He told himself that this was a case, just like any other, and that he'd be done very soon. That he'd find what he was looking for and would be free to exit the infirmary when he was done.

Staggering into the cellar, he took to mapping out his immediate surroundings. The sprawling space was cluttered with abandoned goods, the great bulk of which must've been used decades ago in the care of the infirmary's patients. Beds of a style not seen since the turn of the last century littered the way ahead in several rows. They sat in varying stages of disrepair, their wooden frames often splintered and the metal springs that formed their support jutting out sharply to gouge the air. Degraded mattresses were stacked against the walls in certain spots, with holes torn into them by vermin and many of them so indescribably discolored by mold that they scarcely looked like mattresses at all. Small wooden tables sat stacked in a wobbly configuration, cemented in place only by the dust of years that accumulated between them like mortar.

From beyond this mess of abandoned goods, Ulrich heard for the second time the ululations of something like a human voice. A soft moan, which registered in his frightened mind as vaguely feminine, met his ears. He stopped, his light searching out the source of the sound, but when he saw there was none his mind busied itself in seeking a scapegoat instead. It was the wind playing tricks on him. There must be a large opening in the room somewhere from whence the draft was entering, he fancied. That was the only explanation.

The only sane explanation, anyhow.

It was little wonder that countless people had died during their stay at the Sick House. To see these rows of worn-out beds, to taste the very air that the insane and infirm must've breathed during the months of their convalescence, was too much for him to bear even in good health. Probably when the place had been first shut down by authorities the nuns had taken their patients into the underground, to care for them in this cellar where they were less likely to be found out. It was clear that this was no place for the sick and dying, however. Here and there Ulrich spotted gossamer-encrusted kerosine lamps and small heating apparatuses that, even in their day, could not have kept away the biting subterranean cold.

The patients who had met their end in this house of horrors had suffered till the very last, he now felt confident.

When discussing things with Sister Ruth, he hadn't once thought that the conditions in the infirmary could be this inadequate. Walking through the cellar now, buffeted by the chill, mold-ridden air, he found himself possessed by a great anger. This place wasn't merely inadequate to be used as an infirmary-- it was practically a dungeon.

Ulrich stopped in his tracks, something large and wide coming to light at the end of the room, just beyond the last of the ruined beds. Its end was raised almost a foot from the ground, and a large, warped thing made up of wooden planks sat atop it. Kneeling down gently, Ulrich scanned its dusty surface with his light.

It was an entrance into the tunnels. He'd have bet his life on it. The wooden lid, carelessly fashioned and twisted out of shape by the elements, admitted a constant current of wet, cold air. This was where the draft had been coming from, where the pungent scent of moisture emanated from. Kneeling beside it, he was almost overwhelmed, his eyes and throat feeling scratchy. There was no telling what insidious spores he was breathing in then, or what effect they might have on his health. He grit his teeth and reached out for the lid.

It was light, flimsy, and completely inadequate as a cover for such a large opening.

Ulrich had only raised it a little ways when something suddenly burst forth from the shadowed aperture.

Chapter 24

The scream that erupted from him left his throat raw. The investigator fell back onto his haunches, the phone clattering against the stony floor and illuminating only the faintest edge of the thing that dashed from the mouth of the opening. The wooden lid crashed to the floor, leaving the aperture completely uncovered and admitting the bone-chilling cold into the cellar in abundance.

Rats.

A number of fat, black rats raced from the inside of the aperture, scrambling across the stone floor in a cacophony of screeches and scratchings. Ulrich's chest tightened so hard he thought he was having a heart attack. Wet fur passed across his arms and legs as the racing mongrels fled past him and disappeared into the depths of the cellar.

When the drove had passed, Ulrich slowly righted himself and struggled to get his pounding heart under control. Picking up his light, he pursed his lips and slowly leaned in, giving the opening in the floor his first proper look.

It was deep, and the only sensible form of ingress existed as a rusty metal ladder implanted into the stone. The rungs were flecked in reddish rust, and looked positively ancient. They'd probably been forged by some long-dead Moonville blacksmith in the days when the town was still young, and were fastened into the wall with bolts that, by today's standards, looked rather clumsy. A cursory touch of the topmost rung found it surprisingly sturdy, but of its brittleness Ulrich couldn't be entirely certain. Like the stairs leading down to the cellar, there was no way to know how the rungs of the metal ladder might support his weight. If it gave way during his descent, then there was a good chance of his crashing to the unseen depths below and dashing his head open.

No one would ever find him if he died down there. It wasn't the first time he'd thought that while exploring the Sick House, but as he stared down into the bowels of the earth and urged the bolus of dread down his throat with a series of calculated swallows, it really hit home.

Growing up, Ulrich had always been uncoordinated. Climbing was not one of his strengths; in gym class, when assigned to climb up a rope, his lanky limbs had proven worthless. He wasn't athletic by nature, and his paralyzing fear of heights had only made it more difficult for him.

Peering into the darkness and wondering just how deep the opening was made his heart gallop like nothing else. It might've been a ten foot drop. Or a hundred. The only thing keeping him safe in his descent would be a metal ladder nearly as old as the Revolution.

And, of course, even if he made it down there in one piece, there was no telling just what he'd find once he got there.

There was positively zero comfort to cling to.

He could do nothing but climb down into the aperture and pray that he didn't fall to his death.

His stomach was in knots and he very nearly forfeit his breakfast upon the stone floor as he sidled up to the opening. He slowly slipped one leg over the lip of the thing, seeking out one of the rungs with the tip of his boot. When his footing was firm, he followed suit with his next leg.

It would be impossible for him to hold onto the phone while descending; to head down the ladder into unfathomable depths with only one hand was simply unthinkable. He'd require as much support as possible to keep from slipping on the way down, and thus switched off his phone, placing it in his breast pocket.

Ulrich was promptly eaten up by the darkness, enveloped in a shroud of shadow so profound that he couldn't help but shudder. This was the darkness of the grave, the very color of oblivion.

Holding his breath, he held on tight and sought out the next rung with his right foot.

The metal groaned a little for his weight, but didn't move in any noticeable way. He attempted to allay his terror by counting the rungs.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

He was descending as quickly as his shaky limbs would allow. His muscles were stiff, locking up every time he found the next rung, in order to keep him from loosening up and plummeting. His biceps burned as he lowered himself, and his palms were irritated by the coarseness of the rusted rungs.

I should get a Tetanus booster when this is all over with...

It was on the tenth rung that his foot met solid floor. He could have jumped for joy, and quickly let go of the ladder, fishing his phone out of his pocket. Turning on the flashlight, he bathed his new surroundings in light, illuminating ancient spaces that had been choked in darkness since the day they'd been carved into existence by the ancient workmen of Moonville.

The tunnel was a sturdy thing, a mixture of stone and well-formed soil, very densely packed. Canvassing from one side to another, Ulrich found that the structure spanned a great distance in both directions. If the rumors he'd heard were any indication, then this tunnel system could lead him to most any place in Moonville. As he studied the ancient walls, the rough, dirt floor at his feet, he certainly believed it.

What purpose might the people of Moonville had for such an underground system? Had they used it in the interest of security, to stockpile valuables and evade thieves from out of town? Had they done it for the sake of convenience, perhaps, so that they might have more direct routes to the homes of their neighbors or their places of work? Or, perhaps, had these tunnels been reserved for more nefarious purposes? Such a space as this, so swollen with shadow and separated from the outside world, possessed a culture and spirit all its own.

There could be no doubt; this place could not have served any positive purpose. Nothing good ever occurred in these tunnels, so deep beneath the earth. They'd been fashioned in the interest of primal privacy, to mask certain activities from the eyes of the uninitiated. There was no telling what had gone on down here during Moonville's prime, but Ulrich's frightened mind had no trouble tracing out some macabre possibilities. Certainly Sister Ruth, Sister Astrid and Dr. Klein had thought little of using the system of tunnels to stash away a body. As he looked around, Ulrich had no trouble believing that Teddy's body had been but one of many.

While attempting to decide which way to go in starting his search, Ulrich heard something that made his blood run cold. His limbs, already fatigued for the climb down, seized into a defensive position and the light was brought into his eyes, leaving him temporarily blinded.

He backed away in one direction, then the next.

It didn't matter which way he went, however.

The tunnel was filled with the sound of footsteps, and it was impossible for him to know which way they were coming from.

Carefully, he held out his light and attempted to investigate the source of the noise. If he was about to get ambushed, attacked, then he wanted to defend himself. But the rough sounds of footfalls so reverberated through the passage that he couldn't be sure whether there was one person coming or a hundred.

But then he spotted it, the single source of the noise.

It was only scarcely rendered in the light, but its outline was too dreadfully familiar to him.

A white, flabby foot, then another, struck the dirt floor in staggering locomotion. A lumbering white bulk of a body... a head featuring sprigs of long, whitish hair... an uncertain visage of inhuman abnormality...

This was the thing he'd encountered in the upstairs hallway during his first search of the Sick House. The specter that'd marked up his forearm with that midnight-colored handprint.

And now it had come underground, to meet him.

Chapter 25

Ulrich's strength fled. He dropped the phone and took a scrambling step backward, only to fall onto his ass. Pawing at the soil, he tried to crab-walk away from the oncoming specter, but it quickened its pace and shambled closer, till its entire outline was visible in the glow of his fallen light.

It was then, when his terror was at its absolute zenith and his heart felt ready to spring from his chest that Ulrich realized it. Getting his first prolonged look of the thing, which had previously disappeared into the shadows and remained but a nebulous glimpse into the unknown, he found that he recognized something in it. When it did not disappear, but instead continued forth, coming to stand some few feet away in a sighing, shuddering slump, his memory began to make connections between the shape of the dread specter and the details he'd glimpsed recently in a photograph.

When it dawned on him, his terror was supplanted momentarily by confusion.

Standing before him, glowing with a whitish, ghostly aura in the light of his phone, was Dr. Siegfried Klein.

The doctor, looking very much like the man in the photograph Jerome had given him, stood upright and presented with an eerie smile. The man's form was more concrete, less gaseous than it'd been that time on the stairs. This time, there was no doubt of the figure's humanity, or of its identity. The wreath of greying hair was restored upon the specter's head, and its gentle expression was very much that of the smiling man in the photograph, except that something ominous had been superadded to it. He was completely naked, but his sagging body maintained something of roughness. It permeated cold; had Ulrich dared to reach out and touch the vision, it would have felt like sheer ice, he was sure.

The investigator's mind was blown. He'd encountered this thing during his first day in Moonville.

Dr. Klein, the very object of his search, had been the one to reach out to him in this accursed place on that first visit. The one who'd left that handprint behind on his flesh.

Ulrich had gone running, frightened out of his mind, without ever realizing that he'd just met the very man he was looking for.

The irony was not altogether lost on him, despite his incredible terror.

“I see you've come back,” came a voice from without the doctor. The words were uttered breathily, seeping into Ulrich's ear's and inciting a shudder that saw him scramble back a bit further.

“Doctor, what are you doing down here?” was all Ulrich could think to ask.

Dr. Klein did not respond, but instead fell into a bestial crouch. His arms hung limply between his legs, the backs of his long, bluish hands grazing the ground and his face downturned in a strange grimace like that of a medieval gargoyle. On further reflection, there was no color to the eyes. They were white as eggshells, utterly featureless.

“J-jerome sent me to look for you, doctor,” Ulrich managed, balling his fists.

Clawing his way forward like an animal, a terrible smirk haunted the doctor's lips. His blank eyes were leveled on the investigator. “You want to know what I did,” he mumbled, cocking his head to the side. “But you already know what I did,” he added, turning his head to the other side. “This house holds onto so much, and now it holds onto me, too.”

Paralyzed by fear, Ulrich gulped. “W-what did you do to Astrid? And w-why did you kill that patient of yours, Teddy? Is it because he knew? A-about you and Astrid?

At this, the smirk was dissolved from the doctor's face. In a low tone like a growl, he replied. “You cannot fathom the guilt I lived with for all those years. But I came back. I always intended to. Just like I came back all those years ago to silence that bitch. To clear up my mistake. She thought I was at the university, resuming my studies. Thought that she might be my wife. But she was wrong. I took care of her just like I did that homeless prick... Teddy, they called him. The way he talked to me, I wouldn't stand for it. I had a reputation... a good reputation to uphold. But he knew all about what I'd done with that whore. Surely I couldn't let him out of here alive. It made little difference, though. No one cared about him. No one so much as knew his name. A bit of extra morphine was all that I needed to administer.” The doctor's eyes narrowed. “This house ate me up, just like it did the rest of them. It was unavoidable. It was fate. It is merely the natural order of things. But that whore, Astrid, wouldn't be quiet. For years she hounded me. I can remember the way she'd stand outside my door every night, jamming her little notes into the seams for me to find. She left hundreds of them, trying to lure me back to this place. She wanted me back, she wanted me to face what I'd done. But the bitch didn't realize that I faced it every day. I knew what I'd done to them both. It was something I had to carry, a burden always weighing upon me. When that last note came, I'd had enough. I was going to end it. End it all. Free everyone that has ever been bound to this miserable stain...”

Then, standing bolt upright and clutching at his chest, the doctor began to scream. Loud shrieks erupted from the pitch black tunnel; that they were all emanating from Dr. Klein's lips Ulrich couldn't be sure.

Then, from the very edges of his vision, Ulrich became cognizant of other shapes. Searching hands emerged from the walls about him, their digits writhing like fat worms and reaching out towards the doctor. Though he struggled, Dr. Klein was grabbed from all angles, his pale, flabby form thrust this way and that by the sea of disembodied hands. In this way he was slowly dragged away from the light of the phone, dragged back into the dark depths from which he'd come. His screams continued to echo even as he completely disappeared from sight.

Horrified, Ulrich reached for his phone and scrambled to the entrance of the tunnel system. He needed to get out, to leave the Sick House before the grasping limbs took hold of him, too. He backed away, looking upward for the metal ladder, for the aperture, but saw nothing but waving, frantic hands. His head was filled with the cacophonous screams of the dead, and his strength was rapidly fading. Even if he found the ladder, his body was shaking too hard for him to climb it.

He would probably die here, would likely lose consciousness and get dragged into the shadows just as the doctor had been. This was it, the end. He'd never intended to die in the Sick House, but it was as natural and expected an outcome as any. Ulrich would simply end up as the latest in a long list of disappearances.

The only difference was that no one would come looking for him. No clueless PI would get hired to seek him out. He'd get dragged away and the outside world would forget he ever existed.

Ulrich backed into something soft, very nearly falling over it. Lowering his light, he found it was a long, human-shaped bundle on the ground, draped loosely in a white sheet. Dropping to his knees, cowering from the frantic reach of the phantom hands that erupted from all around him, he took hold of the sheet and pulled it away.

What he revealed made the entire tunnel fall suddenly quiet.

It was a human body, but it wasn't the skeletal, decades-old remains of Teddy that he'd expected.

Dr. Klein's corpse was beneath the sheet, and from his head to his toe, a single word had been etched into his skin. In what manner this had been done-- whether it'd been cut into it with a knife, or burned into the flesh-- he couldn't be sure. The word “GUILTY” had been written again and again across his skin, and every letter oozed with fresh blood like a fountain. The corpse didn't move, but was quickly obscured by a torrent of its own blood, which flowed without surcease from every pore.

And then, its eyelids shot open, revealing two blank, white orbs.

Ulrich staggered away, spotting the entrance to the tunnel just above. Jumping with everything he had, he grasped one of the upper rungs and fought up the groaning metal ladder. His cell phone weighed heavily in his breast pocket and he was plunged into an otherworldly darkness. From below, where he'd left the bleeding corpse of the doctor, he heard a doubtful shifting and rustling which terrified him to no end.

Climb, climb, damn you! It's only ten rungs, he thought to himself, dashing up the ladder as quickly as his body would allow. He made it up the first five, six, and continued till he felt the tenth and final rung in hand. Reaching just above it, he sought the lip of the aperture that would take him into the cellar, but instead, he found merely another rung.

It was impossible, defied explanation. There should not have been another rung. Or, for that matter, there should have not been another, then another, above it. Scrambling further upward, the notion that he'd somehow miscounted was rapidly dismissed.

Ulrich continued to climb from he knew not where, weeping. He hoped that each rung would be the last, that he'd reach the top of the tunnel with the next grab.

But he didn't.

He climbed for what felt like hours, days, never reaching the top of the ladder.

When his body finally gave way, he slipped down into unfathomable depths. He let him self go, let himself plummet into the shadow.

Only vaguely conscious of his descent, he was still free-falling through the darkness when his mind sputtered into oblivion.

Chapter 26

Awareness stole over him like a rough right hook to the jaw.

Ulrich lurched over, his face meeting something hard and smooth. He felt on the verge of vomiting as his mind drew up visions of damp, subterranean tunnels, of abandoned buildings, of animated corpses and disembodied phantom limbs.

But none of that seemed to reflect his surroundings in that moment.

For one, the air seemed comfortably warm, and the smell of moisture was nowhere to be found. Opening his eyes, he was some moments into recognizing the surface beneath his nose; a lacquered wood floor. Slowly, he reached out and touched it with both hands.

Then, from behind, he felt a firm grip hoisting him up off of the floor.

“Awake?” came the voice. Ulrich didn't recognize it at first, his hearing spotty as though he'd taken in a lot of sea water. His eardrums trembled a little at the word. Then, when the speaker asked a second time, it finally got through to him.

It was Officer Mark Dennison's voice.

Blinded by the glow of a lamp, Ulrich slumped back against the officer's grip and was eased onto the edge of a bed. He was dizzy, and the room was spinning all around him, but already he could make out a few details in his surroundings. It was a furnished room, a bedroom. He was on a bed with a scratchy woolen comforter, and there was a small bookshelf near the door. In the doorway was an older woman, standing by not a little concernedly, wearing a grey sweater that matched her greying curls.

“He's awake, ma,” said Mark to the woman, waving her through the doorway. “Bring him some water or something, will ya?”

Licking his lips, he found his tongue a dried-out husk. Ulrich tried to speak a few times, but it was a while before he managed to get the words out as anything more than a baffled whisper. “What happened?”

Mark helped him onto his back, fluffing the pillow behind his head. He grinned, slapping Ulrich in the arm. “I'll tell you what happened. Your hunch was right; the doctor was down there, in the tunnels under the cellar. You found him. Dunno what happened, though. You lost consciousness down there, and it was only when I stopped by to check on you that we found you. You were probably down there a couple hours.” He paused, crossing his arms. “You weren't answering my calls. Figured you'd gone to the infirmary despite my warning and didn't have reception. If I hadn't gone looking for you, you'd probably be in bad shape right about now.”

Ulrich nodded weakly. When Mark's mother brought in a glass of ice water, he sucked half of it down in a single gulp, sputtering and coughing. The drink was refreshing, and with it came a little more awareness. He palmed at his forehead, looking around the room in wonder. “So, you found the body, huh?” He remembered Dr. Klein's body, the bleeding, wounded mass that'd been draped in a sheet in the tunnel. He shuddered for the remembrance.

“Sure did,” replied Mark. “It was a little roughed up, and we're not sure who did it, but our guys think he's been down there almost a month.”

A little roughed up? The body had been utterly savaged, by Ulrich's standards. “What do you mean, a little roughed up?”

“Well, there were a lot of scrapes and such. Looks like some rats might've nibbled him, maybe. But nothing too bad.”

Ulrich held his breath. No mention of the etchings into the doctor's skin? Of the profuse bleeding? As best he could remember it, the doctor's skin had been marked all over with the word “guilty”. Then again, perhaps he'd been mistaken. Or he'd hallucinated.

“Yeah, we found a gas tank down there, too. They think he might've brought it down there with him to burn the place down. The fumes built up down there; I was feeling lightheaded when I went down after you, and I bet you inhaled a lot more of that than was healthy. When you're feeling up to it, we'll get you off to the hospital for a proper once-over.”

Gas fumes? Ulrich couldn't help but chuckle to himself. That was one explanation for the terrifying, hallucinatory things he'd seen in the tunnel. Somehow, though, he wasn't buying it. “You, uh... you didn't see anything else down there, did you?” he chanced to ask, sitting up on his elbows.

Mark shook his head. “Few rats and such. Otherwise, no. And we sent a few guys in to have a more thorough look. Found you and the doctor's body.”

“No other bodies?”

The officer narrowed his gaze. “Uh, no... why? You know something I don't?”

Ulrich tensed. “No. Just curious.” Apparently, Teddy's body remained elusive. Perhaps Dr. Klein had succeeded in stashing away the patient's body before dying in the tunnel. Or maybe someone else, Sister Ruth or Astrid, had moved it.

“We still need to find out who did it,” continued Mark. “We don't have any leads, but this was a murder. Pretty confident of that.”

Ulrich felt his pulse quicken. It'd been a murder, all right. But the culprit hadn't been human. The murderer wasn't someone that could get cuffed and marched off to jail. He'd seen the culprit with his own eyes, had glimpsed, in the hellish bowels beneath the Sick House, the legion of grasping, ghostly hands that'd reached out and dragged the physician to oblivion. Teddy, and perhaps the other spirits of the Sick House had done him in. After waiting for him to return for so many decades, the place had swallowed him up, gotten its revenge. At least two of the deaths on that ancient property could be attributed to him. Astrid had called him back to the infirmary over the years, and when he finally set foot there, he'd gotten his comeuppance.

There was no good way for Ulrich to explain that Dr. Klein had been murdered by spirits. There was nothing he could say to make the truth sound even remotely believable. He'd seen it with is own eyes, had witnessed the retribution of the Sick House against the monstrous doctor first-hand. But no one would ever believe him. He could hardly believe it himself. Even Mark, who believed the place to be haunted, would likely balk at such a report.

And so would Jerome, for that matter.

Ulrich sighed. This was something he'd have to keep to himself. Something he'd have to live with. When it came to reporting off to Jerome about his findings, he'd have to play along with the official line, that the murderer was still on the run. He'd succeeded in doing what he'd set out to do-- he'd found the doctor. Identifying his murderer had never been a part of the deal, though. And he was thankful for it. Ulrich would spare Jerome the sordid details of his uncle's past, too. There was no sense in telling his client that Dr. Klein had been a savage and murderous man. The Sick House had taken its pound of flesh; now, he hoped, the place would settle down. This would just remain one of the countless terrible secrets left buried there. It'd all come full-circle. The bad guy had gotten what was coming to him.

Case closed, he thought, laying back against the pillow. Looking up feebly, he smiled at Mark's mother, who remained in the doorway. “I'm sorry for the inconvenience, dear. I don't suppose you could fix me a strong, black coffee, could you?”

Chapter 27

Ulrich stayed only a short while longer in McArthur. The moment he was well he set out for his home of Toledo, stopping only briefly at Milo's for a final cheeseburger. Despite Mark's repeated urgings to visit a hospital, the investigator proved stubborn, and left town at the first opportunity. The two of them maintained a friendly correspondence in the months to come, and when the forensic reports were returned in early winter, the young officer called Ulrich to let him know that the bones they'd uncovered in the grounds of the infirmary had been positively identified as those of a nun named Astrid Baker.

This, of course, had been expected.

Ulrich's dealings with Jerome were as quick and vague as possible. Desperate to wash his hands of the case, and also to keep the true, paranormal nature of the events he'd witnessed from the client, Ulrich described the subterranean channels running beneath the infirmary and merely guessed that the authorities had overlooked them during their initial search for the missing doctor. He said nothing of the trail of clues that'd led him there, nor of the terrifying visions he'd suffered. Ulrich did not mention the fact that he'd seen the old doctor's spirit on more than one occasion, or that Siegfried Klein had been responsible for two cold-blooded murders decades ago.

To Ulrich's delight, Jerome was not particularly distressed at the condition of the SUV. Though in a terrible state, still caked in mud when he received the keys, Jerome didn't pay much attention to the vehicle during their final meeting outside Ulrich's office. Instead, he proved extremely grateful for Ulrich's work, and seemed preoccupied with the large inheritance that was now coming his way-- a great deal larger than Ulrich had initially been led to believe, if local rumor was true. Despite his endeavoring to act concerned, Jerome had only hired Ulrich in the interest of solidifying his own financial gain. There was a body, and so his inheritance would not be held up in the courts. When Ulrich, and subsequently the State Highway Patrol, announced to him that the doctor's body had been found and positively identified, Jerome asked precious few questions about the how and why. He feigned a little outrage at his relative's murder, but seemed altogether unconcerned with apprehending the killer.

Jerome had his money now, and that was all he'd ever really cared about, despite his claims to the contrary.

For his part, Ulrich had more answers than he cared for. He'd visited the Sick House during his first day on the case, and Dr. Klein had reached out to him, leaving a handprint behind. Maybe the specter had wanted to talk to him then, to come clean. Perhaps Ulrich could have spared himself a whole lot of grief by simply standing his ground and further inspecting the old building, rather than sprinting out of it like he had. In the end, things had worked out, however. He felt proud of the work he'd done, even if the events surrounding the investigation had left him feeling permanently uneasy. Dark streets and unlit corners would never be the same to him, and more often than not, he found himself unwilling to look up into the empty, cloudy windows of the abandoned factories outside of Waterman street during his commute.

Ulrich spent his first day back in Toledo paying debts with the crisp bills Jerome had given him, and he treated himself to a great dinner. When that was through, he took in some live music at a cafe and drowned himself in coffee that would surely keep him awake till morning. That night, rolling around in his bed, he finished the Raymond Chandler novel he'd started so many days before, and then slept soundly until mid-afternoon.

He thought little of any future cases. After all he'd been through, he felt the need to rest and recover.

And more than that, he felt like he'd done more than enough work to last him a while.

Marching around his apartment in his pajamas the next day, he put his Best of Sinatra CD into his boombox and crooned along with “Mr. Success” while preparing a light lunch.

Sometimes, though, in the months after, when the sun was setting and he found himself alone in his apartment, he could not help but recall brooding Moonville. In his dreams he would sometimes envision dark, twilit scenes where doubtful shapes shifted among the walls of trees. Squat, rundown habitations would leer out at him from the depths of sleep, their primordial darkness suggestive of yet unexplored dimensions of terror.

Thankfully, this vague fear of his was nothing that a little Sinatra couldn't banish.

Thank you for reading! I hope you've enjoyed The Sick House. Want to read about more exciting adventures from PI Harlan Ulrich in the future? Consider joining my mailing list below for news and updates on the series!

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