“Dr. Wilkins still has his keys. And when Nurse Vic and Wayne see the reporter and TV crew coming in, all hell’s going to break loose. That’s when I’ll sneak you into the tunnels. From there we’ll go to my car, over in the employee parking lot next to the medical treatment center.”
“The tunnels they brought me through when I first got here?”
He nodded. “They’re all connected, like a giant maze beneath the buildings. That’s how food and laundry, pretty much everything, gets moved around.”
She hated those damn tunnels, but she’d crawl through a cave full of rats and snakes if it meant escape. Maybe the tunnels weren’t as constricted as she remembered; maybe the drugs had given her a distorted view of things, like the cakes and bottles of liquid in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“Wait,” she said. “When the reporters come inside, why don’t I just tell them I’m being kept here against my will? I’ll tell them about Rosemary and—”
He shook his head.
“What?” she said. “They’re looking for a good story, aren’t they?”
“They’re breaking into an institution for the mentally retarded. Do you really think they’ll believe you?”
Shit. He was right. No one was going to believe a resident of Willowbrook who said they were someone else. Going into the tunnels was her only choice. And anything was better than being locked up in this awful place for even a minute longer than necessary.
“What if someone catches us down there?” she said.
“That’s a chance we’ll have to take,” he said.
She thought about her options. She could wait until Alan returned, or until Eddie was able to talk to Heather or Dawn. But who knew if her friends would believe him or know how to help? They might even think she was playing a prank on them for teasing her about Cropsey.
“Okay,” she said. “Then what?”
He shrugged. “Then I’ll take you home.”
CHAPTER 12
Desperate to control her nerves, Sage followed Eddie through the narrow tunnel, ready to turn and run if someone should appear around a corner. Between the fear of getting caught and the ever-present gnaw of claustrophobia, it was all she could do to put one foot in front of the other. It seemed like only yesterday she’d been dragged through the tunnels to the unimaginable hell of House Six, but at the same time, it felt as if an entire lifetime had passed, as if she’d aged a thousand years.
Eddie walked slowly ahead of her, listening for footsteps or voices, putting a hand up whenever he heard a sound. So far, to her relief, the tunnels had been deserted.
The cave-like odor of mold and wet stone filled the cold air, and fat rats scrambled along drainage ditches next to walls striped green and gray with gritty water and mildew. Metal conduits and rusty pipes ran along the ceiling, dripping a brownish fluid that reminded her of sewer water, onto the cement floor. Dusty lightbulbs in metal cages emitted a weak, jittery glow that seemed, at times, like it might blink out at any second and leave them in complete blackness. If that happened, she thought she might scream. Luckily, Eddie had a flashlight in his back pocket just in case.
Naïvely, she’d hoped she’d only imagined the tunnels being tight and low, that they would actually be tall and wide, like the subway system beneath Manhattan. Unfortunately, her memory was accurate. She felt like a giant crawling through a rabbit hole. Getting out of there couldn’t come soon enough.
Only ten or twelve minutes had passed since the reporter and TV crew had burst into the dayroom of House Six, followed by a panicked Nurse Vic, who had no idea what to do other than frantically—and uselessly—ordering them to leave. When a cameraman’s floodlight pierced the dimly lit space, one of the men said, “My God, they’re children.”
Another man said, “Welcome to Willowbrook.”
The reporter and cameramen stood wide-eyed and staring, clearly shocked and appalled by what they were seeing. As the floodlight panned the room, desperate figures were framed in direct light, then lost in a shadowy blur. The bright, moving light gave the residents a jumpy, surreal quality, like the scope of a hunting rifle revealing skittering prey. There was a twisted, spindly leg. There was a grossly swollen head. There was a mass of dark blotches smeared across the wall. There was the grimy white fabric of a straitjacket on a dark figure in the corner. That child crouching on the floor with her back to them was naked, and so were the two next to her.
When the reporter ordered the cameraman to start filming, Wayne tried to intimidate them into leaving. He shoved the reporter by the shoulder, but the man warned Wayne that if he interfered, his face would be shown on every news station as a perpetrator when the story came out. With that, Wayne put up his hands in surrender, stood back, and let everything happen.
During the chaos, Eddie and Sage slipped out through the double doors. They could hear Nurse Vic shouting in the dayroom behind them as they darted along the hallway toward the nurses’ station; residents cried and screamed, and the voice of a reporter, stunned and shaking, began describing the chaos around him. After hurrying to the other side of the nurses’ station counter, Sage followed Eddie into the supply room. She thought she’d scream while he fumbled with his keys, trying to find the one to the tunnel door. Finally, he unlocked it, and they went through. He slammed the door shut behind them, muffling the growing uproar in the dayroom, and locked it again. A bulky paper bag sat at the top of the staircase that led down to the tunnels; Eddie picked it up and handed it to her.
“What’s this?” she said.
“Extra clothes. Hurry up and put them on.”
Inside the bag was a pair of corduroy trousers, a long wool coat, and a worn pair of men’s boots. After pulling on the pants, which were too loose around her waist and almost worn through at the knees, she slipped her arms into the coat and pushed her bare feet into the boots. The boots were too big, but it felt good to have something on her feet again. When she was ready, they went down the crumbling steps into the tunnels.
Now, it seemed like they’d been in the tunnels for hours, turning left and right and left again. “Are we almost there?” she whispered.
“Not yet,” Eddie said over his shoulder. “After we pass the morgue and the autopsy room, we need to go under the emergency surgery and dental halls. Then we’ll come up near the parking lot next to the hospital.”
She cringed. “The morgue and autopsy room?”
He nodded.
“Jesus.” As if she weren’t scared enough.
Behind them, an engine roared to life, making her jump. Grinding gears echoed in the narrow shaft like a screeching animal. “What was that?” she said too loudly.
He turned and held a finger to his lips. “It’s just a generator. Nothing to worry about.”
She swallowed the bitter taste of fear and kept going.
After turning right again, they crept down another dank tunnel, past swinging double doors below a sign that read: MORGUE. She tried not to look through the windows in the top half of the doors, but couldn’t help it. Behind the stainless steel autopsy table, bottles labeled EMBALMING FLUID lined the counter next to a three-basin sink. In the far corner, a body storage vault with six doors took up nearly a quarter of the room; its hinges and handles rusty and tarnished, the wood under each door stained with something that looked like tar, as if something inside had rotted and leaked out. The odors of mold, formaldehyde, and something that smelled like warm pennies hung in the air outside the room. She put a hand over her nose and mouth, the sickening-sweet odor reminding her of biology class when they’d dissected frogs and she gagged so much the teacher had to send her to the nurse. Pulling her eyes from the morgue doors, she tried not to think about what happened in that room, or wonder whether any dead bodies lay cold and stiff inside the vault.