Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

“I know a place,” Cooper says. “A couple of them actually. East-lake Home and. .”

“Sunnyview Shelter,” Adrian finishes. “That’s where you took Emma Green.”

“How. .”

“I’m not as stupid as you think,” Adrian says, enjoying this feeling of. . of what? He doesn’t know the name for it because he’s never felt it before. A word like super, but longer. And with a t in it somewhere.

“You were there? Is that how you knew about me?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Adrian answers, not wanting to tell Cooper how he had been following him for days before collecting him. “If I agree to take you there, how do I know you won’t try to escape?”

“You can do what you want to me,” Cooper says. “You can tie me up if you must, but please, Adrian, we must leave now. I cannot afford to be caught here.”

“Because you killed that girl.”

“Yes.”

“For two days,” Adrian says.

“Two days.”

“And then we come back.”

“And then we come back,” Cooper says. “I’ll pack up some stuff and hide everything away,” Adrian says. “Nobody will ever know we were here.”

Grover Hills is a twenty-minute drive out of the city to the west, taking me well past the airport and the prison and beyond, into the Canterbury Plains, made up of farms with barbed-wire or electric fences keeping livestock and wheat at bay. It gets even hotter out there the further I get from the city, the extra kilometers west bringing me closer to the sun.

I take a turn off the highway and begin following a series of neglected roads. The institution is hard to find because once you start heading down these roads there aren’t as many street signs as in the city. Either the council didn’t care about this part of the world or the locals took them down in the hope strangers would get lost out here long enough to enter the gene pool. Roads go from tarmac to stone and back to tarmac, changing from intersection to intersection where you have to slow down every few minutes to give way to a farmer moving sheep or cows from one paddock to another, the farmer high up on his tractor, sheep dogs barking and running around with their tongues hanging out, desperate for water and attention. A few days ago, coming back from the prison, we passed these kinds of sights, and the appeal at becoming a farmer and working the land hasn’t grown in that time.

I get lost and pull off the side of the road into short grass with deep tire ruts from tractor tires, the car bumping up and down. I keep the windows rolled up and the air-conditioning cranked up on maximum. I study the map for five minutes. Map reading has never been my strong suit. I trace over the lines with my finger wishing my wife was here because she’d ask one of the farmers for directions. Whenever we went anywhere new, I’d drive and she’d read the map and Emily would sleep in the backseat and it was a dynamic we were all happy with. I take an educated guess at where I might be on the map but am probably better off just flipping a coin. I carry on driving. It takes me another fifteen minutes driving over unpaved roads to find the place. I figure if you weren’t crazy when the courts or doctors committed you to Grover Hills, you certainly would be after the drive.

The start of the driveway has a couple of big oak trees acting as sentries, then dozens of silver birches lining the way, their branches thin and twisted and silent in the still air. I park out front and step out and dirt and dust settles behind me and covers the car. It follows me as I walk up to the building. Grover Hills is run-down and nature is trying to reclaim it. Most of the grounds are knee deep in wilted grass and overgrown shrubs that look like giant weeds. The building started out white last century and may have been painted once or twice since then, but certainly not since the moon landing. It’s a giant building that wouldn’t look out of place on a plantation, lots of clapboard and small windows and plenty of rooms. Some of the boards are twisting and others are rotting but all in all the building looks to be in pretty good condition. Abandoned, no doubt about it, but certainly habitable. One whole side of the building is covered in ivy, streamers of it climbing up the walls and entwined in the clay roof tiles. The amazing thing is that nothing has been vandalized. People in this country have a habit of finding places no matter how hidden in the middle of nowhere they are. They find them and smash the windows and knock holes in walls and spray paint giant penises all over them.

The rental car is the only thing out here making a sound. No breeze, no birds, just the car engine pinging as it cools down. It’s eerie. It’s like I’ve gone way off the map and into a different world, crossing over some Star Trek alternate reality barrier along the way. In prison there was always sound. The humming of the fluorescent lights. A toilet somewhere being flushed. Snoring, coughing, yelling, laughing, footsteps and fighting, air-conditioning. It became white noise, one sound canceling out another. But out here there’s nothing. I take a few steps forward, expecting my feet to make no sound, but they do, they pad against the ground and make exactly the amount of sound I’d expect them to make anywhere else, and the magical spell of being transported to another land is broken.

I start by walking the perimeter, the gun firmly in my hand. Out front the ground is mostly stone and dusty dirt and some areas of sand; nothing but weeds poking through it every few meters or so, there’s a path that’s broken up by nature and time, triangle corners of cement broken and pushing upward like merging tectonic plates. There is absolutely nothing to suggest it rained last night. Off the path and I start treading carefully, not wanting to step into a rabbit hole and disappear or break my ankle. The grass gets thicker and scratches my legs. I do a circuit of the house. Behind it there’s even more vegetation than out front. There’s plenty of mold all over the walls. The dirt is softer. I make it back around to the front without seeing anything of interest. No people, no cars, no graves, just two lines of compacted stones and dirt in the driveway where cars have come and gone, no way of knowing when the last one was here. There’s a block of trees about a hundred meters away that is the start of a series of woods.

I keep the gun pointed down as I walk. Grover Hills feels empty. I have the feeling you get when you knock on somebody’s door and you know nobody is going to answer. But I still keep the gun out. The front entrance is a pair of wide double doors. I step up onto the wooden porch and try them. The left one swings open noisily, the hinges like that of an opening coffin that’s been unearthed. The sun is so high that the angle stops it from gaining entry through the doors because of the veranda. It’s dark inside. Not nighttime dark, but the kind of dark you’d get stepping into a boarded-up church. The air inside is dry and a little cooler the further inside I go, but not much. It doesn’t feel like anybody is here, but the building doesn’t quite feel abandoned either. It feels like some thing, not some body, is here.

It doesn’t look like the kind of building you’d expect an institution to be. It doesn’t have long white corridors with doors locking them off every fifteen meters. Instead it looks like a giant farmhouse, lots of wood everywhere, a very New Zealand version of what we must have thought mental institutions looked like back then. The windows have wire grills over them. There are lots of rooms, and I can see that each one of them has a lock on it. There’s a staircase leading up to a second floor. I haven’t had much luck with staircases lately so I start with the ground floor. I follow the path of the hallway, opening doors and looking into bedrooms on my way to a large communal area where maybe there was a TV set and a Ping-Pong table. There are still couches here, all of them in poor condition, some of them facing the windows overlooking the fields. There’s a door that leads to the kitchen. There is no sign of life, but there is the feeling of being watched. It’s creepy. I can’t shake the feeling that all the dark thoughts from the patients who were locked up out here have formed some malevolent entity that’s haunting the soul of this building, and if that entity came forth my gun would do me no good. In the kitchen there’s a large fridge that looks a hundred years old. I open it up and it’s empty except for layers of mold and no light comes on. I flick one of the kitchen light switches and nothing happens. No power. There’s a long stainless-steel bench with two sinks in it, there are clearings in the dust, circles and lines where objects have been placed and then moved very recently.