Asylum (Asylum, #1)(36)
Dan listened to the painful crawl of the song as the notes wound down, the mechanical tune dying a lingering death. Finally, it stopped, and the room fell silent once more.
He tipped the box over and found an inscription etched into the bottom.
To Lucy: On your birthday with love.
Dan stared at the words for a long time, hoping maybe if he just waited they’d change or disappear. This couldn’t be the same Lucy, could it? Abby’s Lucy? If Abby’s story had been true, it didn’t seem like Lucy’s parents would have been the type to send a birthday present. Maybe it was a gift from the warden himself. Either way, what was it doing down here? Did it mean that Lucy had . . . died . . . or just left it behind?
Dan kept worrying the question like a sore tooth. One thing he knew for sure: he would not be sharing this discovery with Abby. She would go out of her mind worrying about what it meant.
He set the box back down on the floor and turned to leave the cell behind him. But suddenly, the disjointed song started up again, getting louder and clearer and faster as it played. Dan thought about smashing the box to stop it, but he chose to flee instead. That box had meant something to someone, once.
Dan continued down the hall, coming to the rotunda off which he and Abby had found the inner office. This time he took full stock of the space, shining his flashlight all along the wall and finding a small doorway across from the office. He took hold of the knob and turned. The door wasn’t locked, but it didn’t budge either. It had swollen shut in the dampness and gloom. Putting all his weight behind it, Dan turned and pushed as hard as he could. The door shrieked a protest, but open it did, and Dan only just caught himself from a nasty fall. Lowering before him was another set of stairs.
Dan was looking into a yawning void. How far under the earth did this place go, anyway?
The cold rushing up from the space below was shocking. His sweatshirt wasn’t close to being warm enough; he should have brought a damn parka. And couldn’t they have built the stairs a little wider? A safety inspector would have a heart attack—these stairs were steep, narrow, and had a sheer drop on both sides, with only a tiny pole of a railing to hold on to.
Clutching the rail in one hand and his flashlight in the other, Dan took the first step. Three stairs, four, ten. At fifteen steps, he reached a small landing, but he still couldn’t see the floor with his flashlight. Just more and more stairs, pitched at a nightmarish incline, leading into the bowels of the basement.
One more landing, twelve more steps, and at last he reached the bottom. He shined his flashlight up and around, watching as the meager light failed to find the top or even sides of . . . What, a cave? A vault? He couldn’t be sure, but he could tell it was enormous. Coughing, he listened to the sound bounce and echo for a solid minute before finally fading away.
He slowly walked forward into the huge space. There were wooden posts that ran from the floor to the ceiling. Otherwise, the hall he was in seemed completely empty.
Finally, he reached a square arch leading into yet another space beyond. Dan suddenly felt like laughing—he’d been creeped out by the expansiveness of the cell level and the warden’s secret office, but this was something else, something he could hardly fathom, even as his eyes fed him the information. It was like a palace down here. What could it have been used for?
But this was the last room; it had to be. Shining his light all around, he found a rusted metal box screwed into the wall beside him, and he carefully nudged open the front panel. The rusty hinges squealed, and the echoes in the chamber reverberated endlessly.
He’d hit the jackpot. There were switches in the box, and lots of them. Dan flicked the biggest one and was rewarded with a low hum, then a buzz, and finally a quiet pop as the lights came up. Only a few worked, and one exploded overhead in a shower of glass and sparks. Dan ducked instinctively, and then gasped.
He was looking down into an operating amphitheater.
In the very middle of the room was a raised wooden platform, and standing dead center was an operating table. It was covered with a smooth sheet, originally white, now gray with dust. There was a padded pillow at the top. Leather straps, buckled, trisected the bed. Around the main table stood a few smaller tables on wheels. They had surgical instruments on them.
Encircling the platform were stepped rows of chairs, like in a sports arena. The stands. As if watching someone’s surgery was some kind of amusement . . .
With a sickening lurch, Dan realized he’d seen this room before, too, in another nightmare. In his dream, he’d started out on that table.
He moved slowly down the stands, drawn to the platform. He walked a complete circle around it, his eyes never leaving the table. How many killers had been treated here? Had little Lucy been strapped down for surgery while people watched? Dan thought of the scar on her forehead that suggested a lobotomy. If it had been that, and she had survived, poor little Lucy wouldn’t have had much of a life.
Why on earth would an operating amphitheater be built so far underground? Were they concealing something?
A small desk and filing cabinet at the very back of the room caught Dan’s eye. They’d both been pushed into the shadows as if they wanted to be overlooked. Dan’s heart raced. If patients were operated on here—if Lucy Valdez had been operated on—there would surely be records of it. If he was lucky, those records might not have gotten lost in the shuffle when Brookline closed.