Part 3 (1/2)
”This wasn't an asylum, it was a sanatorium. They used to bring tuberculosis patients here for a rest cure,” Arkeley explained.
”Did it work?” she asked. He shook his head. ”Three out of every four patients died in the first year. The rest just lingered on and on. Mostly the health authorities just wanted them out of the way so they wouldn't infect anyone else. The cure amounted to fresh air and simple manual labor to pay for their keep. Still, the patients received three meals a day and all the cigarettes they could smoke.”
”You're kidding. Cigarettes for people with a respiratory disease?” ”The cigarette companies built this place, and all the other sanatoria like it all over the country. They probably suspected a link between smoking and tuberculosis-smoking made you cough, after all, and so did consumption. Who knows? Maybe they just felt sorry for the infected.”
Caxton stared at him. ”I wasn't expecting a history lesson tonight,” she said. He didn't reply. ”You said that I couldn't be more wrong. How else was I wrong?”
”It isn't abandoned. There are still patients here. Well, one patient.”
She was left, as usual, without further information. She had to imagine what kind of hospital would be kept open for a single patient.
They entered through the front door where a single watchman in a navy blue uniform waited, an M4 rifle slung over the back of his chair. He wore the patches of a Bureau of Prisons corrections officer. He looked bored. He definitely recognized Arkeley, though he made no attempt at greeting the Marshal.
”What is this place? I've never heard of it,” she said,
”They don't advertise,” Arkeley told her.
They pa.s.sed through a main hall with narrow spiral staircases at each corner, leading both up and down. Large square vaulted chambers stood at every compa.s.s point. Arches here and there were sealed off with bricks, then pierced with narrow doorways with elaborate locks. Power lines and Ethernet cables hung in thick bundles against the walls or stretched away across open s.p.a.ce, held up by metal hooks secured in the ceiling.
Caxton touched the dark stone of a wall and felt the ma.s.sive coolness, the strength of it. Someone had scratched their initials in the wall right next to where her hand lay, a complicated acronym from a time of rigidly defined names: G.F.X.McC., A.D. 1912.
Arkeley didn't stop to let her absorb the atmosphere of the place. He strode forward briskly, his squeaking footfalls rolling around the ceiling as echoes that followed her close behind as she rushed to keep up. They pa.s.sed through a steel doorway and she saw where the paint had been rubbed away from the jamb by countless hands over time. They moved through a white corridor with plaster walls, studded by a dozen more doorways, all of them wreathed with cobwebs. At the far end a sheet of plastic hung down over an empty doorway. Arkeley lifted the plastic aside for her, a strangely comforting gesture, and Caxton stepped inside.
The ward beyond was bathed in a deep blue glow that came from a ma.s.sive lighting fixture in the ceiling. The bulbs up there had been painted so that everything red in the room appeared to be black. The contents of the room were varied, and somewhat startling. There were rows and racks of obsolete medical equipment, enameled steel cabinets with bakelite k.n.o.bs that might have been part of the Hospital's official equipment. There were laptop computers and what looked like a miniature MRI scanner. In the middle of the room was a tapered wooden coffin with bra.s.s handles and a deeply upholstered interior. Cameras, microphones and other sensors Caxton couldn't identify hung down over the coffin on thick curled cables so the coffin's contents could be constantly and exhaustively monitored.
An electrical junction box with a single b.u.t.ton mounted on its face stood next to the doorway. Arkeley pushed the b.u.t.ton and a buzzer sounded deep inside the sanatorium. ”You read my report. You know I set fire to all the vampires on that boat in Pittsburgh.”
Caxton nodded. She could guess what came next. ”You'll also remember Lares only had enough blood to revivify three of his ancestors. There was a fourth one who went without nourishment. Strangely enough, the ones with skin and flesh burned just fine. The one without was merely charred. She survived the blaze.”
”But vampires were supposed to be extinct in America,” she protested. ”Extinct in the wild,” Arkeley corrected her.
A plastic barrier at the far side of the room lifted and a wheelchair was
steered into the coffin chamber. The man who pushed it wore a white lab coat with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He was a little skinny-otherwise he had no distinguis.h.i.+ng features at all. Then again he was likely to appear nondescript in comparison to his charge. The woman in the wheelchair wore a tattered mauve dress, moth-eaten and sheer with use. She was little more than bones wrapped in translucent white skin as thin as tissue paper.
There was no hair on her head, none at all except for a few spindly eyelashes. The skin had broken and parted from the bones of her skull, in places having worn away altogether, leaving s.h.i.+ny patches of bone visible. She had one plump eyeball, the iris colorless in the blue light. Her ears were long and sharply triangular and riddled with sores. Her mouth looked broken, somehow, or at least wrong. It was full of shards, translucent jagged bits of bone. Caxton slowly made out that these were teeth. The woman had hundreds of them and they weren't broken, either, when she looked closer. They were just sharp. This was what she had read about in Arkeley's report. This was one of the creatures he'd set on fire in the belly of the boat-a vampire, an old, blood-starved vampire. She'd never seen anything more horrible, not even the near-faceless half-dead who had peered in through her window the night before.
”h.e.l.lo, Deputy. You're on schedule-it's just about feeding time at the zoo.” It was the man in the lab coat who spoke. He pushed the wheelchair closer to them than Caxton would have liked. She felt nothing from the vampire, no sense of humanity, just coldness. It was like standing next to the freezer cabinet in a grocery store on a hot summer day. The chill was palpable, and real, and wholly unnatural.
”Special Deputy,” Arkeley corrected.