Nightmare (32 page)

We agreed to the plan, though the extra trouble we went to
added two hours to finally reaching our destination.

Pierre found a side road that looked like it led around the
far side of the building, and we parked about two miles out so
we could walk the rest of the way.

It was biting cold up on the mountain and all three of us
had come without winter apparel. I insisted we slog through the
dangerous, hard-to-see forest off to the side of the main road,
and no one argued.

Creeping through the forest, yet keeping the road in sight,
we made painfully slow progress. Not once did we see a sign of
any sort along the road, but we did see trucks. Unmarked white
trucks thundered by us, coming and going again and again. The
thought of what they were probably delivering made me feel a
little sick to my stomach.

Despite the dark, it was impossible to get lost, because the
big white building always loomed straight ahead. It was so huge, it barely grew in our vision even after walking for more than half
an hour. Oddly, we couldn't see any windows. The thing was a big
white cylinder, like a missile silo for an incredibly fat rocket.

As we came to about half a mile out from the building, I felt
something cold touch my nose. I stopped and looked around.

It was snowing.

We couldn't believe it. We were walking through a snow
shower in a dark mountain forest at the end of summer. There
was no way things could get any more surreal.

We finally drew near to the building and found it to be devoid
of electronic fences or guards. Pierre pointed out that there was
probably no need for them, since the building was completely
unmarked-no logo even designating it as Durham Holdings
International-so for all intents and purposes, it just didn't exist.
Who needed security when nobody in the world knew where
you were?

The three of us squatted behind some trees just on the edge of
the forest and got a look at the loading dock where several of the
unmarked trucks were backing in and unloading their cargo.

I hugged myself in the cold as I got a better look at the building from up close. It was even bigger than I'd thought. The lack
of windows made it hard to judge, but I guessed it must have
been over fifteen stories into the night. And while it was perfectly
round, its white cement sides were not smooth. Hundreds or
maybe thousands of symbols were carved into the cement. Every
inch of the building was covered with the colorless engravings,
overlapping and intertwining with one another. In no way did it
surprise me to see that they bore a resemblance to Dr. Eccleston's
alchemical symbols.

I had been to a lot of places all over the globe that most sane people considered to be frightening. Yet I hadn't been genuinely
fearful in many of them. The behemoth of a building that stood
before me like an enormous sentinel reaching high into the night
sky was the most terrifying place I'd ever seen. I couldn't imagine
why DHI had gone to all the trouble of building Ghost Town; if
they wanted to scare people, they should've just invited them to
see what I was looking at now.

"Look there!" Derek whispered, pointing to the loading
dock.

A couple of workers in navy blue jumpsuits-deceptively similar to those of a paramedic, I noted-were hauling something out
of the back of one of the trucks. When it emerged into the open,
we could see that it was a gurney, carrying an unconscious man,
who was covered with a white sheet all the way up to his neck.
The two men wheeled the stretcher up a ramp inside the covered
delivery bay, and we could just see the recipient. A man in a lab
coat, holding a clipboard, stopped them and took custody of the
gurney and its occupant. The two delivery guys waited off to one
side while the man with the clipboard turned the unconscious
man's head painfully to one side and took a close look at a black
mark at the base of his neck. The symbol. He noted something on
his clipboard and then nodded at the guys in the blue jumpsuits.
They grabbed the gurney again and pushed it through a large
doorway that led inside the building.

"Guess we know where they're doing the whole `soul extraction' thing," Derek whispered. "At the rate they're bringing them
in, it makes me wonder how many of them are in there."

"But what do they do with the victims' bodies after the procedure?" I asked. "I see them taking plenty of people in, but noth-
ing's coming back out."

"There's no conspicuous landfill in sight," said Pierre.

I was glad Pierre didn't finish that thought, for Derek's sake.
He didn't need to hear someone suggest that his girlfriend's body
could be piled beneath a bunch of others in a big hole.

"Anybody thinking about Star Wars?" Pierre asked.

"Wookie handcuffs?" I guessed.

"Wookie handcuffs," he said with a nod.

Derek glanced at both of us, a mixture of eageness and resolve.
"Let's do it," he said.

APRIL 22ND

It took a full three weeks ofJordin's badgering, pleading, begging,
and promising never to ignore my instructions again before I
deigned to even speak to her. It was another week after that that
I finally agreed to take her on another trip.

I knew I shouldn't. I knew my doctor would kill me, and that
it could be dangerous for Jordin if she really was the epicenter of
all the activity we'd been finding. But I also knew that she'd go
investigating anyway, without me, and though I hated to admit
it, I felt a certain level of responsibility for getting her so hooked
on this stuff. Plus, the scientist in me had an almost clinical
desire to see this through, just to find out if it really was Jordin that was somehow a magnet for so much of the paranormal
activity we'd seen.

I could hold on to a grudge for a long time. I got it from my
mother. So I enjoyed nursing those angry feelings for Jordin as
long as I possibly could.

Making matters worse between us was the fact that Jordin
had lost her digital recorder and video camera in her rush to flee
the church in New Jersey. These were easily replaceable, but it
irked me that if we had to have gone to a place like that, we had
absolutely nothing to show for it. No evidence whatsoever, despite
the extraordinary and awful things that happened there.

Plus, my physical well-being was foremost on my mind now,
since the events in NewJersey had done nothing to help my heart
condition. More than once, even the memory of the things we'd
seen at the church in Mount Hope had nearly forced me to take
a Valium to keep my heart from racing.

When I felt like I was up to it again and I'd decidedJordin had
suffered enough for her sins, I said I would take her investigating
again. But I told her I would only do it on the condition that I had
no more than two or three of these trips left in me. The end of
the school year was approaching and we both would have exams
to study for soon, so whenever I said we were done, we were done
for good and I wouldn't be talked into any more of this.

She agreed with one condition of her own: that I make these
last few trips the biggest and best we'd ever undertaken.

Choosing locations to fit that bill wasn't hard. The first one
that came to mind was an obvious choice, but I decided to save
that one for last in favor of a more immediate trip to California.
My parents lived in San Jose, and I was eager to see them. I hadn't
yet shared with them the news about my panic disorder-I didn't want to do it over the phone-and my inner child was longing
for a little parental sympathy from Mom and Dad.

After we exchanged tea and sympathy, I asked Mom and Dad
how the family business was doing. I was hoping to find out,
without giving away my reasons for asking, if they had seen an
increase in the levels ofparanormal activity in their investigations
of late. But Dad reminded me-and I should have remembered
anyway-that they were in the middle of their annual downtime,
between seasons of the show. They were consumed with the business side of things-paying bills, planning where they would go
to investigate next season, that sort of thing-and had conducted
no investigations of their own for months.

After personal time was over, we pointed our rental car west
and I informed Jordin of our next stop.

"Alcatraz?"

"Private access for one night. I promised you'd be very generous to the National Park Service."

Alcatraz was an easy choice for me. I had been fascinated by
the place and its storied history since before I was able to join my
parents on investigations. My career interest in criminal justice
might even owe some small bit ofinfluence to my obsession with
the island prison. Before this trip, I'd been at least a dozen times,
mostly as a tourist, though there had been a few investigations
over the years, as well. I was pretty much a walking encyclopedia
when it came to Alcatraz.

It's said the island was haunted long before people ever inhabited it. Before Europeans discovered the New World, Native
Americans held to the belief that the island was occupied by evil
spirits. They called it Devil's island, and it was used as a place
of imprisonment almost as soon as it was found by the living.
Native American tribes banished tribal lawbreakers there for
years or even the rest of their lives, depending on the severity of
their crime.

Jordin rented a private boat to take us to the island and gladly
paid the exorbitant sum of money required to have the place
entirely to ourselves overnight. I warned her against sending the
boat away, along with our park service friends, suggesting that
we might want someone else on the island with us in case things
went wrong. But she was growing more and more independent
of late, despite what happened at the church in New Jersey, and
argued the only way to control our environment was to limit
human access. In the end, I agreed, and she paid each one of
them to sail away into the sunset, leaving us completely alone
on the twenty-two-acre island.

The dilapidated main cell house was arranged in four long
rows of cells, called cell blocks, each assigned its own letter-A, B,
C, and D-with a corridor running between them. The corridors
were lined with cells on both sides, while catwalks above held
more cells on the second level.