P. Parrish - An Unquiet Grave

“But that young man, the guard we saw outside, missed it,” Dr. Seraphin said.

“The guard isn’t a cop. He has no idea what to look for,” Louis said.

“Maybe the police don’t either,” Dr. Seraphin said. “If they knew what they were looking for, they’d be as convinced as you that the key to this man’s existence is this building, and they’d have people here.”

Louis was quiet, not wanting to tell the doctor she was right. There was a cold breeze drifting in from somewhere and Louis looked around for a new broken window. He found it near the back of the room. But he was surprised to see it wasn’t broken but just lifted open. The steel grating on the outside was screwed to the bricks, but the screws were loose, easily removed and replaced by hand.

“He has a new entrance, too,” Louis said.

“And again,” Dr. Seraphin said, “the guard heard nothing, saw nothing.”

She was right again. Once he told the state police about the corn and the open window, they would have no choice but to put cops out here twenty-four hours. And do hourly walk-throughs. Maybe they could somehow push this man back into the open and leave him with nowhere else to go. Then maybe, just maybe, he might make a mistake.

Louis made a mental note to make sure he went back around to this window to tighten the screws before he left. Better yet, he’d find a way to keep the grating permanently fastened. And when he could, he’d do that with all the windows and shut this bastard out of the hospital completely.

He turned to see that Dr. Seraphin and Oliver had left the room. He followed them, deeper down the hall. He was trying to place where he was, and he realized they were near the narrow caged staircase that led to the upper floors.

“Do you smell that?” Dr. Seraphin asked.

Louis stopped, inhaling. It was urine. And not stale. And there was something else far more putrid.

Dr. Seraphin pushed open a plain white door.

It was a small bathroom. The white walls were splashed with spray-painted red graffiti and pentagrams. The floor was littered with soiled toilet paper, beer cans, and cigarette butts. The toilet was full of yellow water and feces.

“I find this man fascinating,” Dr. Seraphin said, walking away from Louis. “He moves about this building with extreme comfort, despite the constant presence of the guards, the workers, and the staff.”

“Is he smart?” Louis asked. “Or just gutsy?”

“He is neither,” she said. “It’s just that he operates with a logic you cannot. He sees this as his world and he moves with such ease and confidence in it I’m sure he feels he’s invisible to everyone else.”

“Explain,” Louis said.

She shook her head, and he sensed she was annoyed at his ignorance.

“I need any help I can get, Doctor,” Louis said, trying to be patient.

“His feeling of invisibility started when he was very young,” she said. “Either he was ignored and grew up believing he was in some way invisible to his parents or he was abused, which forces a child to wish he were invisible to prevent further harm.”

“If he thinks he’s invisible, why doesn’t he just walk in the front door, right past the guard?” Louis said.

Dr. Seraphin smiled at his question. “You’re thinking too literally. His belief is far more abstract. Because he’s learned to behave in ways that keep him invisible, he will not do anything to change that.”

Louis didn’t want to admit to her he wasn’t following. There was something else in his head, and he tried to push it away but the images kept playing.

A foster home, the last one before he had come to live with Phillip and Frances. That two-story brick house on Strathmoor, owned by Moe and the woman with the brassy red hair.

A closet. Small. Dark. And thick with the smells of dirty clothes and urine-stained sheets from the bunk bed under his that belonged to a tiny, brown-skinned boy whose name Louis couldn’t remember.

There was a rope tied to the inside doorknob of the closet, and Louis was holding the rope with both fists to keep the door from being opened from the outside.

But he could hear Moe looking for them. Hear him throwing things and shouting for the little boy to come out and take his whipping for peeing the bed.

And Louis was holding the rope with all his might, but the door jerked open, ripping the rope from Louis’s hands, and Moe’s big body stood over them, a silhouette against the sunlit bedroom window, his kinky black hair a raging explosion around his head.

Moe jerked the little boy from the closet and threw him onto the lower bunk, and Moe’s hand started coming back in long, vicious strokes, the leather snapping every time it hit skin.

And Louis remembered cowering back against the clothing and sheets, knees against his chest, eyes closed, praying Moe would not see him. Praying that just for once, he could be invisible.

“Mr. Kincaid.”

He looked at Dr. Seraphin. “What?”

“Let’s go on and see what else this man left us,” she said.

Louis followed her farther down the hall. Ahead of him on his right, he saw the green door with PASSAGE 12 stenciled on it. Only now, a strip of yellow tape was strung across it.

Louis stepped to it quickly.

The yellow tape had MICHIGAN STATE POLICE stamped on it and hung loosely from the metal door frame. The frame had been pried away from the wall and the door had been forced open. It was now ajar and Louis pushed it inward, opening it the rest of the way.

The slim light illuminated dirty yellow tile walls and a concrete ramp that sloped downward. Once level, the floor turned to a gray tile that disappeared into the darkness ten or twelve feet deeper in.

“Where does this go?” he asked.

Dr. Seraphin was standing a few feet behind and she didn’t come to the door. “It’s a tunnel, Mr. Kincaid. There’s a network of them connecting the buildings. We used them in the wintertime to transport food, supplies, patients, whatever we needed to.”

He looked at her, stunned. “Why didn’t you tell me about these before?”

“Excuse me?”

His voice grew sharper than he intended, but he couldn’t help it. “This man gets in and out of these buildings like a ghost and you didn’t think to mention there are tunnels here?”

“As you can see,” she said, motioning to the pried door frame, “this door was not accessible to anyone before the police opened it. It was sealed in the late seventies because the tunnels had been declared unsafe. And we didn’t have the money to repair them.”

Louis stepped down the ramp and looked at the inside of the door. There was no handle there, either. Only a thick, steel latch that had once been welded to the frame. It was not something that could have been easily removed by someone without tools, and now that it had been opened, the door no longer closed flush.

Louis shoved the door all the way open to gain as much light as possible and started down the ramp.

The air grew cold with a dirty dampness that made it hard to breathe. He could hear water dripping, see rusty streaks on the walls.

Louis stopped. Damn it . He needed a flashlight. He needed backup, too. He had no business going down here alone.

He started to turn back when something ahead caught his eye-a splash of gray in the faint shifting light. He went forward a few more feet. The darkness came down around him, and he felt his heart quicken as his eyes adjusted. Then it came into focus.

A cinder-block wall.

He moved to it, running his hand over the cold blocks from one end to the other. The wall filled the width and height of the narrow tunnel.

He pushed on it, but it didn’t give. Then he shoved forward on individual blocks, making sure none of them was loose. It was solid. Louis dusted his hands on his jeans and backed away, still looking around. The side walls looked intact, and the ceiling was water stained but in one piece, a string of electrical sockets still in place. There were no other entrances. He walked back to the ramp.