the call and tosses his phone onto the passenger seat where his wife should be. His eyes flicker to the rear-view mirror. The sight of Archie’s empty booster seat is a punch to the gut. He should have believed Leah that Simon was back. He’s going to kill the bastard with his bare hands.
I’m coming-I’m coming-I’m coming.
He grips the steering wheel tightly.
He hopes he’s not too late.
Chapter Sixty-Six
Leah
Now
Twenty years ago I had made this trek, the security of my sisters dulling my panic. Now there is only me. Injured by my fall, my back shrieks with protest but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything except finding my son. I burst out of the main building. It seemed inevitable that I would be greeted with a clap of thunder, a flash of lightning, but the sky is a flat, cloudless grey and it’s worse somehow. The silence. A storm would no longer faze me. I am incredulous that I was ever scared of the weather. This sharp-tongued fear relentlessly licking at my organs, coating my insides sour, is like nothing I’ve ever experienced.
My baby. My boy.
At least the hammering rain would make me feel I wasn’t quite so alone. That I was recreating the past that, if not granted a happy ending, was at least satisfactory.
We were all alive.
Then.
My stomach roils. I push the image of the ballroom away. Glassy eyes staring up at me. Grey skin. Blue lips. I can grieve later. Now is not the time to fall apart. It is as though my feet remember where to go. This time there is no circling around back to the main building. The decontamination chamber looms in front of me. The rusting DANGER sign still in place. I have left the wooden post back in the ballroom and feel small and vulnerable but filled with an unmatchable fury. My mother’s instinct roaring louder than the beat of my heart, which I know thuds in sync with the life I created. The life I will save, even if it costs me my own.
Abandon hope all ye who enter here. I hadn’t noticed that last time but I notice it now.
Simon, I am coming for you.
I step into the entrance where I once huddled with Marie while Carly covered our footsteps in the wet earth outside. This was where Carly had dropped her shoes and Moustache and Doc had found them. Holding the door open for light, I scan the floor. My body jolts as though it has been shocked when I see two small trainers I recognize. Thomas the Tank Engine’s face beaming from the heels.
Archie is here.
I try to calm my breath before I move on. Then, Carly had fumbled for our hands and I’d held tightly onto hers as we edged our way into the next room. Now mine are empty. I ball them into fists.
I am ready.
The smell of the shower room rises, slime still thick on the walls. I search through the gloom for a piece of the pipes that had littered the floor last time where they had been wrenched from the walls. There is nothing I can use for a weapon. The graffiti is everywhere.
This is the building it all ended in!!!
This is SO cool!
Creepy as fuck
I know what I’d do with three girls in here!
Wanker, someone had written underneath.
Lastly, by the open door, a sign. THIS WAY next to an arrow.
Ghouls and ghosts are everywhere. I rub my arms to feel my flesh, the warmth of my blood coating my bones.
I am here.
I am here again.
Following the arrow, I try not to think of the true-crime fans’ mounting excitement when I feel nothing but dread. In the corridor, the hole in the roof has stretched wider. I raise my face and can see both the sun and the moon vying for dominance, casting their glow into the place that I do not want to step into but must.
The morgue.
Although I am trying to be strong, I am crying as I tentatively open each of the lockers that are too small to hide an adult but would easily house a small child the way they had before. The memory presses down on me, heart-wrenching and overwhelming. Carly pushing Marie and I inside. The feel of dust and grit on my skin. The soft click of metal on metal as she closed the door. The sense of suffocation despite the stagnant air being plentiful.