One
The Spirits of Springwood
“The old man”
Monday
29 October
Vincent Anta was feeling apprehensive, something he had never handled well, but so many things were happening that he considered putting off the job at Springwood Hospital.
That had never happened before; once he said he would help a client, he did the best he could. And he was always there as scheduled.
This job, this fucker, was scheduled for exactly the wrong time in exactly the wrong place and absolutely at the edge of the very worst weather he could imagine.
To get it done, he and his team would have to rush to get there before sunset and set up, enduring the icy cold, and if that wasn’t bad enough, if they needed any more time, they would be against the clock, with the storm due to hit in less than 48 hours.
That had him growing more than apprehensive; now, watching the sun shine through the east windows in the living room, it would be easy for him to pooh the storm warning, and he really didn’t want to believe an epic storm like they were describing was possible. But the weather forecast had not changed except for the worse, and he was sick of listening to it.
Therein lay the problem: he never delayed or canceled an investigation once it was set. Once it began to snow, even if he wasn’t satisfied that the job was done, he’d leave. That burned into his conscience.
In most places, he needed security guards to give his people access, with keys, shutting off alarms and opening gates.
At Springwood Hospital, there would be none of that, as the campus was vast and open. He only had to meet a guard at the “Men’s Health Building” to open a padlock and pull a chain from the handles of the double doors. The building had been locked since 1952, so Vince had made sure to put a large pair of bolt cutters in the base, or mobile operations vehicle. Something told him no guards would go near that building. He doubted that, with all he had been told about the place, anyone had ever gotten close enough to the building to change the padlock.
Owing to the frigid temperature, he had already turned the Caterpillar diesel over, and it sat in the cul-de-sac out front, idling. It was so cold that shutting it down would mean it would not start again without charcoal pans and salamanders running to keep the fuel from gelling. Once that happened, it would render the fuel pump useless. The Beast, as he called it, had been custom-manufactured to his specifications, utilizing a 1981 W-900 Aerodyne he shipped to the facility to be repainted and the cab and sleeper compartments changed to a much longer chassis fitted with an array of equipment he needed. In the end, she rolled out of Renton to the eyes of executives watching in awe, it moves on for further equipment customizations elsewhere. It took six months to get it delivered, and three more to test and troubleshoot the electronics she was fitted with. What the team ended up with was a stunning sight.
Beautiful as she was, she was no match for this weather. He had to leave her running all day.
Robin, his comptroller and secretary, primarily handled his construction company, which had grown massive and had made him rich. But she doubled as the research and communications operator for Maryland Historical Investigations, a very serious non-profit entity that charged no fees for what would, on television, be called ghost hunting.
The reality was that he had a psychic, a medic, Robin monitoring field communications from the truck, a priest and a second team that used an old step-van now painted a gleaming white. Because of his inclusion of a priest, he was very serious. He knew that spirits of the dead rarely had the power to do the things he was called to investigate.
And one of the few things Vincent Anta hated was old hospitals, because there was always something there that was dangerous and very difficult to get rid of. His team didn’t do videos or write books. They just helped people, and even though Springwood had new buildings, new wards, the campus was very old and had abandoned buildings all over the place. The state had left the sturdy brick buildings in place because of the high cost of demolition. None caused any concern, encased in weeds and vines as they were, but the Men’s Health Building was recently getting a great amount of attention.
On an on-campus “outing,” the patients had been playing softball on the diamond beside it back when the summer was still real, when three patients went missing. The Carroll County Police and Sheriff’s Department had been called in to search for them but it was no use; they were gone and even now were missing. The next day following the interrupted game, the campus was on lockdown. Two security guards and two deputies were looking up from the field toward the building, wondering if that was where the missing patients were. Through the windows, dirty and almost opaque, they suddenly saw faces peering out.
But not the faces of people. These were shadows, or looked like shadows. Except…they had tiny eyes that were lighter, and gave the men the horrible feeling that those things were watching them.
The two security guards had quit right then, walking off the job without even punching the clock.
Zelda Keller waits for Vince at the Administration Building entrance
During his tour and briefing, Vince had been told by the PR representative that everything got worse after that. The woman’s name was Zelda, and she had captured Vince’s fancy immediately, being fair, in her 30s, very fit, and blessed with a head of beautiful silver and gray hair that was straight, and went in a beautiful cascade past her shoulders. She had easily seduced him, and he was smitten, but he couldn’t forget her genuine terror of the place and the situation. She seemed to be aware that whatever was happening, it was going to get worse.
“You’re not telling me something,” he said that day, and she was glad for the chance to tell him. She had only withheld this part because of her fear that he would not help. She saw that she was wrong.
“A doctor was killed on July 30th, attacked by what paramedics called an animal like a large cat. But I don’t believe it. I heard him screaming all the way in my office. I’m the one who called 911. He was attacked, but he wasn’t just screaming from pain and any fear I’d say was normal , even considering that his wounds were ultimately fatal. He was screaming because he was being scared to death. I have heard screams like that.
“We want you to exorcise that building. The doctor was walking past it because he parked his car nearby. Something’s in that building and we want you to send it to hell.”
It was a tall order. Exorcisms of buildings were difficult to do and were often unsuccessful. If the attacker had been demonic, and he wasn’t ready to believe that without reading the Medical Examiner’s report, which wasn’t even posted yet, then he resigned himself to the fact that the trip might be for nothing. Demons were not the spirits of the dead, unable to move on. They had never lived at all except as spirits sworn to the service of Satan. They did not easily let go once a building or wooded area had been claimed. Such places were known as cursed ground, consecrated to Satan.
And this part of Maryland was never known to have large predators. Occasionally there would be a black bear passing through, but they were shy and attacks were extremely rare. No, not a bear. But he refused to rule out other animals because the weather was predicted to turn cold, and in the mountains, it already had. Severe conditions could make animals desperate, drawing them out of their habitat in search of food and shelter.
He had Robin call the ME. If the deceased had certain wounds not typically associated with animals, he could make a conclusion as to what he was up against.
Vince was pulled out of his morose ruminating by a knock at the front door. He went down the foyer steps and opened it. He was shocked. There stood an old man with long gray hair, wearing classic 70s Foster Grant sunglasses and a black leather jacket. He would have laughed considering that an old, battered Fiat idled behind him, sounding a bit like some car in an old movie. Vince pictured this asshole on a chopper.
“Mr. Anta?”
“Yes?” Vince said, gesturing the old man to enter; the bitter wind had picked up.
The man leaned on a tall hand-carved walking stick and with a grunt of pain said, “I know where you’re going tonight, and I’ve come to warn you not to.”
“Why?” Vince asked, hoping this crazy jerk had a good reason for him to stay in.
“How do you know where we’re going? Nobody else knows that.”
“If I told you, you would not believe me. I just know, okay? And what I have to tell you is that if you go there, something terrible will happen. Something so bad even I can’t see it. People will be hurt. I see death, too. Lots of it. You don’t want to cause that. I’ve studied your work. You help people. Don’t go to that place, please. It will not help anyone, and more suffering than you can know will be the only result.”
“If you know but you can’t be more specific, I can’t excuse myself from an obligation. Sorry.” He thought the asshole was crazy. “Maybe you’d like to come with us?”
“I have something else that needs my attention tonight. If you proceed, you have to pray up, you and your whole team. Both teams. You’re right to guess that you’re up against demons, but one of them is particularly dangerous and it killed the doctor. Within a short distance of the walls, it can sense negative emotions and with that energy, attack and kill. The doctor walked right into a kill zone.”
“You seem to know a lot, old-timer, but you don’t want to help.”
“I am helping you, Mister Anta. I’m telling you not to go.”
“I gave my word.”
“Nobody would blame you for not going. The coming storm will be a really good reason. You need to make your own preparations. You have heavy equipment on sites and they need fire pans and winter fuel mix. Your house is not safe. Everything will be buried. Get your firewood out of your truck garage out back and stack it in the garage attached to your house. You’ll need it when your generator runs out of fuel. Stock up on food, water, first-aid supplies. Sandy has a good supply but it won’t be enough. Get these things now, tonight, while you still can.”
“I don’t go back on my word, old man. And how the hell do you know so much?”
“Mister Anta, do you know what happens tonight?”
Vince thought he knew what old hairy would say, and sure enough, “Mister Anta, the full moon, the Hunter’s Moon rises. Please, don’t go. You can stay here and make the storm far less serious.”
“I have no choice.” The stranger placed a hand on Vince’s right shoulder and whispered, “There’s one way to survive then, and I can’t make you know what it means or follow what I say. Vince, it’s faith. You can endure anything if you have faith.”
It was a final plea, and as the stranger turned to go, Vince waited, closed the door and suddenly wanted to be far away.
“The Hunt”
Vince parallel parked the command vehicle at the curb in front of the Men’s Health Building, set the air brakes, and pulled the throttle lock to keep the Cat turning at a higher RPM level than when it idled. This was to keep power going to the generator, slung between the chassis rails under the command module. They needed lots of power tonight. While Robin, a sturdy blonde woman with her short hair in a perpetual ponytail, set up her console on the rear wall of the module, would monitor the comms and coordinate the two teams, Sandy, the licensed paramedic, who had beauty, strength and was indefatigable, disembarked and began to arrange equipment and her field medic’s bag on the sidewalk. Robbie Sanchez, a native Spaniard, broke out work lamps and hooked them up to extension cords and laid out a digital camera and tripod, plus four powerful spotlights with pistol grips and neck straps.
They never used gizmos and gadgets TV ghost hunters did. Those things didn’t work. Robbie, their psychic, could give them all the information they needed. The spotlights were two million candlepower, able to throw light clean to the end of the long main hallway.
The command vehicle was stocked with everything. Food, a small refrigerator, a microwave, a television mounted high in the front right corner, and spartan but adequate bunks that could swing down from the walls with heavy straps to hold the outer edges securely. There was even a coffee maker, which had sustained them through many investigations.
At her disposal, Robin had LED displays for five camera inputs, but tonight there would only be two running: one for the digital camera on a tripod and one for the video camera Robbie carried.
Mounted behind the command module was something the priest had suggested: an unpainted 1,000 gallon fiberglass tank for holy water, complete with a steel ladder and diamond plate deck just big enough on top for someone to sit and aim a vintage water cannon from an old fire truck.
The three team members going into the building gathered their equipment, adjusted their parkas and beanies, and they were ready. Vince didn’t say anything, but the priest, Father Cunningham, was a no-show, and that scared him. He had already called him, but the priest was too busy preparing for the storm. He had his parish to look after, and he had already laid out bedrolls with blankets and pillows on the pews, ready to help stranded and homeless people if any needed shelter.
Vince didn’t like it. As soon as he cut the chain on the door handles, he swore something inside had made a noise.
“What, Vicente?” Robbie asked, then it hit him: a wave of anger and hate that knocked him to the ground.
“¡Jesucristo!”
Vince looked down at him, terrified. That had never happened before. Something unseen had hit Robbie. He finally reached down to give him a hand up, and asked if he was okay to go on.
Shaken and visibly trembling, Robbie answered, “Jes,” in the accent he usually hid.
With the work light set, Robbie activated the tripod-mounted camera, and they all proceeded to check out the front rooms. “Bad place, mano,” Robbie said. “We should leave.”
“Why,” Vince asked heading into the reception area.
“Too much, too many, they kill me already,” Robbie said, obviously in great distress. Vince came back into the hallway, where they all saw a little girl in a filthy old-fashioned dress with a bow tied in the back skip right in front of them and into the long, pitch-dark hallway, going away from them. She vanished into the impenetrable darkness, but her buckled shoes still skipped away.
“What the fuck,” Sandy screamed. “Vince, let’s go home, please!” She was sobbing.
A shuffle startled them, and the work light changed position. None of them had done it.
“What the fuck!” Vince yelled. There, leaning casually but menacingly at the same time against the wall, was a grown woman! Vince would have said she was beautiful if he had seen her on the street, but in this setting, where she didn’t belong, he felt his chest pound painfully at the sight.
On the comm each of them heard Robin yell, “Get the hell out of there!”
No one had ever heard Robin sound scared before; now she had a voice high and full of terror.
The woman stood, still against the wall, staring menacingly at Vince. Long black hair, a finely sculpted face, green eyes such as he had never seen the likes of. She dressed in a red turtleneck sweater, a gray blazer, jeans and boots. The cold air didn’t seem to bother her, but she was no ghost; she was undeniably real. She had moved the work lights to spot herself.
“Who are you?”
“I am someone you don’t want to fuck with,” she said.
Vince quipped, “yeah, you’re not my type anyway.” Insults and humor were an instinctive response to terror, and Vince was terrified.
This did not seem to bother her, and she said, “You met my friend earlier, this morning. He warned you to stay away, and you didn’t heed his advice. That was very stupid. You think you can cast out my friends, do you? Well, tell the old man I’ll be seeing him soon. Just mention the Watcher. If he’s still stumped, just say that Amy sends her regards and promises to reunite with him soon. I’m ready to take my place by his side.”
“What are you talking about?”
But she was gone. Sandy had been shining her spotlight down the hall and Robbie looked at what she was pointing it at and said, “¡No!”
Robin called in, “Stick men! I can’t believe it! Guys, get out of there!”
A big shadow at the far side of the hallway moved. It was tall, a smudgy black, and had glowing white eyes that blinked. “It has eyes! It blinked!” Sandy said, and dropped her light and ran for the exit, crying hysterically. “Run!” Vince screamed, and Robbie was ahead of him when Vince knew he wasn’t going to make it. Where is your faith, the old man’s voice asked him in his mind.
He heard the demon, coming too fast behind him, snarling like something disembodied should sound like, because he’d heard the sound before.
He was almost to the door, and Robbie was already out, when Vince felt the talons dig through his parka all the way to his skin. They dug in like a garden rake and then tore downward, and his skin opened up, sounding like a giant ripping a huge sheet in half.
He fought for the door while Robin screamed “are you fucking crazy? Something has Vince!”
And they all left the command module by the steel steps and ran to grab Vince.
They each grabbed any part of Vince they could. All three pulled and Robbie finally let one hand go and he withdrew a large cross from his jacket, and the demon made a sound like a snarl and a scream mixed, and let Vince go. Sandy’s medical instincts kicked in and she said, “he’s bleeding out, get him inside,” and once there, she went to work. She had left her field bag in the building, but her two boxes of trauma supplies were ready.
“The Second Team”
The “junior varsity,” as they called themselves, were down the hill, past the softball diamond, parked on a narrow drive. They were beside the cemetery, really one of two, the other being unmarked, its location kept a secret. This one had marked graves but no tombstones: there were tiny stone markers set into the ground, each with a date of death but nothing else. Both graveyards were a source of ongoing shame to the hospital because they hadn’t been given services, and were unknown. It was a dishonorable thing to do, burying them like that, but in the last century, back between the founding of the hospital in 1856 and 1985 when the last reform bill had passed the Senate, mental health treatment had been under scrutiny. What came out in the newspapers was horrific, and the particulars had not even been printed. One reform caused patients to be released to the streets and even worse places than the hospital just after the Spanish flu began in earnest, killing at will in Camp Meade, then spreading statewide, leaving at least one hundred thousand dead in Maryland alone. Poor houses and shelters became stacked with bodies as measures to restrict public interactions had just gone into effect. Robbie Sanchez didn’t like it when the flu was brought up in the group mission brief, because the “Spanish” flu was never Spanish. He kept his tongue still though, because deep dives into history was a part of what they did, and sometimes, he needed to know things to “tune” his sensitivity and avoid “interference,” as he called it.
The next reform came in 1948, when “patient dumping” was still the opposite of what it later came to mean. People with unruly or learning disabled children would drop the kids off at the gate. Robbie had never heard of such a thing and lost his temper. Dumping their own children? Who could do such things in a country as rich as America? He had seen real poverty and desperation and depravity, but he had never imagined parents with jobs would do such a thing. At that point in the mission brief, where Robin was running down the history of Springwood, she told Robbie to please go off and say a prayer for lost souls who had no closure, and do a few Hail Marys. That always made him feel better. Although he was gifted, which he felt was really a burden, Robbie was a deeply devout Roman Catholic who she was sure had a hotline to God. Miracles had happened when he prayed. He was a good and decent man.
The final reform had occurred under the Reagan administration, and it was for Reaganomics, not mercy. But between those years, Springwood and just about every mental hospital in the country did unspeakably evil things to patients.
Again, Robbie had known none of this, but Robin was very strict about her briefings; she didn’t dig into the past for nothing, but she was good at it, and history often led to clues as to how some cases should be handled. When the dead did not rest, there was always a reason, and sometimes a solution. But Robbie was a very kind young man who was hurt by what people did to each other, and he didn’t understand how evisceration while a patient was alive had anything to do with disorders of the mind.
The last reform killed a lot of people, who didn’t get placed in group homes. They wandered the streets, begging for cigarettes and food and money to drink because all medications had been discontinued. By the end of the 1985-86 winter, most had committed crimes to get a warm cot in prison or had died, and because they didn’t matter, that was another death toll that went uncounted in a country where counting only applied to money.
Those draconian medical procedures had ceased, and better psychotropic drugs had been developed, and now there was a rehab success rate that, while not overwhelming, was still significant.
Between 1948 and 1951, several buildings including the Men’s Health Building were abandoned and sealed. Robbie, praying over Vince’s massacred body, knew that reopening it had awakened and empowered something very old and very evil. Like the old man had warned Vince earlier, something terrible had happened. They had unleashed devils into the world.
At the cemetery downhill, around a bend and hidden by woods, Jenine Lamonica had been watching through a night lens on her Nikon digital HD camera, and so far nothing had happened. At the top of the hill, flanked and backed by dense woods, there stood three giant crosses, and the scene was more macabre than comforting. They were enormous, five inch by five inch oak timbers preserved with pressure treatment.
They were out of place and they caused her anxiety. She had a very deep feeling of dread. And danger.
Sam Dunton, her static video camera operator who could remotely swivel or zoom in on something, and her audio man, Ernie Easley, were inside the converted step-van, getting warm while she took her turn outside. The full moon was rising and as soon as she noticed, she saw that it was a super moon. She took it as a sign. She tried to radio Team One but there was no response. Then she tried to call their cell phones. Nothing. She tried the frequency for Robin’s telemetry cluster, which had been modified to send photographs and addio bytes, as well as typed communication, and found it didn’t get a response either.
Without hesitation, she stuck her head inside the slide-open door at the passenger seat, and said, “Guys, wrap it up. Double time, were aborting the mission. Come on, let’s go!”
She was too late.
As ordered, Robbie had called in an emergency and requested medevac right on the softball field. Vince would never make it if they tried to drive him anywhere, so he parked the command vehicle at the edge of the diamond and lit flares and climbed back inside.
Sandy was working so fast he could barely keep track of what she was doing, while Robin assisted and monitored vital signs.
Vince’s back had been torn open and the flesh torn so badly that his spine was visible. She had him lying on his stomach, and she was using clamps so fast that she didn’t know how many new ones were left. She packed the clamped bleeders off with gauze wadding, moving from the neck to his lumbar spine.
“Oh, no, Robin, look. It got to his spine. See that?”
“All of the muscle tissue at the T-7 is gone. He’s never going to make it.”
“Just keep working,” Robin said. She was more rattled than Sandy was. Robin was the skeptic of the team; in none of their jobs had she ever seen proof of the supernatural. Now she had, and she was deeply shaken.
As the medevac landed, the worst had already befallen the second team. As Jenine coiled an extension cord, a sound called her attention up the hill. The center cross was moving!
It moved from side to side very fast, like a giant was trying to get it loose from the ground. As she stood frozen in fear, her bladder threatening to let go, it suddenly flew up off the ground and was hurled right at them. She didn’t even have time to warn Sam and Ernie. The massive twelve foot-tall cross hit the side of the van, killing all three of them instantly. Police would find the van bashed in on the side, flattening it to the other side, and they would find Jenine crushed under the lower section of the upright.
This would end MHI as it had been; never again would they take on a client.
The medics carefully slid Vince, long since unconscious, onto a spine board. If they could keep him alive and immobilized, he had a slight chance to survive. Sandy had not been able to work on his hip, but now the medics would take over, and she quietly wept as Robbie drove off the campus, and she knew that he was going to die.
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