“Sammy. Sammy, wake up. Wake up, something’s wrong.”
My eyes fluttered open, and I rolled over in the stuffy darkness. Shadows cloaked the room I shared with Peter, the second-oldest boy in the Sunbright Youth Center, but I could still make out the tiny form of Tarren shaking me awake, her little ponytail in disarray.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” I rubbed at my eyes, not quite awake, the digital clock on my nightstand reading 01:45. “You’re going to get in trouble being on the boys’ floor.”
But the skinny 8-year-old just yanked on my ragged T-shirt sleeve some more and cast an anxious glance back toward the hallway. “The grown-ups are gone.”
“Of course they’re gone.” I punched my lumpy pillow to try and return to the blissful world of unconsciousness. “It’s night-time, Tarren. The caretakers all have real homes to go play in. Go back to sleep.”
“No.” She jerked hard on my arm, enough that it actually hurt, and whisper shouted into my ear with a hot blast of Cheetos-scented breath. “There’s no one downstairs, and none of the lights work. They put chains on the doors.”
They did what?
I sat bolt upright and managed to whack my forehead against the underside of Pete’s bunk. “Ow, son of . . . sorry, did you say chains?”
Her frizzy head bobbed in a nod, and Tarren bounded for the door, her sneakers squeaking on the old hardwood planks. “Come on, come see.”
Cold floorboards greeted my bare feet, and I sucked in a breath to try and wake up. Raised in one orphanage or another from the time I was three, I’d learned when to know something bad was happening by how adults reacted to you entering a room. In the screwed-up world of the US foster care and adoption programs, that skill could be the difference between you successfully aging out of the system or getting ‘adopted’ by the kind of people who only wanted you for one very illegal thing. Sunbright wasn’t as bad as some of the other government institutions I’d been in before, but the adults here had similar lackluster attitudes toward the kids, and the chains on the doors made me wonder if they’d decided to ‘adopt’ us all at once in the middle of the night. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d heard of such things happening.
“Peter.” I banged on the side of his bunk with my fist until he groaned and sat up. “Up, now.”
“What?” He blinked with dark eyes, his long, goth-inspired haircut tangled and sticking up in places.
Peter would turn 15 in two weeks, and like many of us when we hit our ‘deplorable’ status (as we called it) he knew that once you were roughly high-school age, your chances at adoption flatlined. Granted, most people stopped adopting after the age of 12, but sometimes there was hope, right up until you hit freshman year. No one wanted a moody high schooler in their house that wasn’t theirs, so it was survival of the fittest until you hit 18 and got to mosey out the front door all on your own.
“Something’s up with the caretakers.” Suppressing a shiver of nervousness, I yanked on my ratty clothes as fast as I could. “They cut the power and chained the doors.”
Like me, Peter went rigid at that, his eyes wide, and the sleepiness faded. “You serious?”
“Uh huh. Get dressed, come on.”
By the time we stumbled out into the hallway, the narrow corridors of the old-fashioned building rang with muffled voices, whispers, and shuffling feet. Dozens of tousled heads poked out of their bedroom doors, and several kids darted out to follow as Peter and I sifted through them, counting faces as we went.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
“Cap, are they really gone?”
“Is this some kind of prank?”
Without a word, I pushed through the horde of boys to the stairwell and headed down to the girl’s floor on the second story. This place had been built during the 1930’s, ironically by another government program, and just like this one, it too had done a less than satisfactory job. Paint crumbled off the walls, the brickwork showed its age, and rust coated the pig-iron handrails no matter how often it was chipped off and repainted. A distinct moldy smell always permeated everything, and the aged hardwood floors squeaked and creaked with every step.
Reaching the second floor, I flung open the stairwell doorway in time to see a familiar form step into the dim light of my dollar-store flashlight.
“There you are.” Grace Harper shielded her eyes, little Tarren at her side. “Everyone up on your end?”
I was the oldest boy in the orphanage at 17, my eighteenth birthday closing in this August. Grace was the oldest girl, having just turned 16 this March. Grace was the kind of girl who had that ‘classic beauty’ as one old lady visitor had put it, though it never did her any favors. Despite her raven black hair and hazel eyes, she’d been un-adopted twice after Grace raised enough hell to exhaust her would-be-family. This had been by design. She and I both knew that the only ones who would look out for the little ones here were the older kids, and not everyone in Sunbright was so kind.
That was where Grace’s mean streak came into play.
Once, a 13-year-old girl had gotten hold of an unlabeled bottle of green fluid and thought she would make her roommate puke with it, as a joke. As it turned out, it was rat poison, and the girl’s roommate died on the way to the hospital. Had she shown remorse, the prankster might have been forgiven, but she instead strutted and bragged about having her own room. She didn’t know Grace had already put two-and-two together.
That night, the janitor found the prankster at the bottom of the basement stairwell, with her skull caved in.
No one had been able to pin it on Grace, not after I’d helped her wash the heavy pipe wrench off and snuck it back into the janitor’s tool kit without him so much as suspecting a thing. But after that, no more kids died, and catfights were much tamer when Grace walked into the room. Grace repaid my loyalty by helping me sneak an old syringe we found in one of the broom closets into a particularly creepy-looking couple’s car, and then calling the cops to prevent them from ‘adopting’ one of the little boys on my floor. That was the way of things in Sunbright. I controlled the boys, Grace ruled the girls, and together, we kept the younger kids from getting hurt, or worse.
“All up.” I glanced past Grace into the hall where all the girls crowded together just as the boys did behind me, the stairwell packed with eyes and faces. “Anyone missing on your end?”
“Nope.” Grace shone her own little penlight back down the hall, over the heads of the various girls. “But all the cars are gone in the parking lot.”
That’s definitely not good.
Most of the caretakers left the orphanage at the end of the day, but usually one or two stuck around at night to watch over us . . . or at least, make sure we didn’t try to run away. For them all to leave like this, without warning, left a cold knot in the pit of my stomach.
I turned to Peter and pointed at the boys in the stairwell behind us. “Get everyone upstairs, girls included. No one moves until we come back.”
“Sure thing.” Peter obeyed without question, my reputation as well-known as Grace’s, and soon they all flooded past us, up the stairs into the floor above.
With everyone else gone, the second floor plunged into eerie silence, with creeping shadows and small puffs of dust from the un-swept corners of the hall. The air tasted drier than usual, and my skin tingled with anxious beads of sweat.
“This way.” Grace headed down to the opposite end of the building, and I paced along beside her, the two of us panning our lights around in mute tension.
In the dark, with the suffocating silence all around us like thick, black cotton, the orphanage looked even more decrepit. The eggshell white of the walls appeared corpse-gray, the wooden floors dried out and cold, and the dome-shaped lights in the ceiling yellowed from dust. It somewhat reminded me of a ghost movie I’d seen once, but I had to push that thought from my head as we descended the opposite stairwell to the ground floor.
“So, you’re sure they’re all gone?” I cleared my throat in the dark, my voice higher and squeakier than I would have liked.
Grace chewed on her lower lip, and I caught a slight tremble to her voice. “I-I think so. I snuck a look downstairs earlier. It looks like they packed up and left in a hurry.”
Pausing at the base of the stairs, she turned back to me, and I could see the worry etched over her pale face. “Do you think we’re safe here?”
No.
It hit me like a clap of thunder, and I aimed the beam of my flashlight deeper into the shadows. “I don’t know. Let’s just check to be sure no one else is down here, and then we’ll figure out an escape plan.”
Her touch on my arm stopped me, and for some reason, a warm, tingly feeling spread through my body, enough to steal my breath away.
Grace jerked her head at the stairs, her expression grave. “Whatever we do, we have to stick together, all of us. We’re all we have left, Sam.”
I drank in the way her eyes pierced mine, as if they went straight through me, and nodded. “That’s alright. We’re all we need.”
A grin flashed over her slender face, and Grace smiled, which made me smile as well. Even in this darkness, she shone like a star.
Taking a deep breath, I placed my hand on the first-floor stairwell door handle and pulled.
Cheery drawings adorned the walls, made by the younger kids so the caretakers had something to cover all the decayed bricks with. A dusty glass trophy case displayed the various plaques and certificates won by the caretakers during government inspections, also out front and center for any potential parents to see. It had always amused me how the ground floor looked so nice in comparison to the other two, with polished tile floors, well-painted walls, and spotless windows. Visitors never came any further than this point, and so to the outside world, Sunbright lived up to its name in every way.
We padded slowly down the barren central hallway, our sneakers making soft footfalls on the tilework. Everything lay empty, the various caretaker offices, the visitor’s lounge, all of it immaculate, save for a few stray paperclips near the reception area. I did notice that most of the caretakers’ desks were cleaned out, their personal effects gone, along with any pictures they’d had. Only the cafeteria stood untouched, as if the fleeing adults couldn’t have been bothered with all our party decorations in their desperate attempt to escape the unknown.
All four walls of the cafeteria still bore the pirate-themed decor from our Fourth of July celebration, hand-stenciled skulls and crossbones intermixed with store-bought American flags. Sunbright’s pirate-invasion had started when Peter agreed to help me and Grace act out various scenes from books for the younger kids as entertainment, since we had nothing else to do. The only three books I had were the Bible (dull) Pride and Prejudice (Grace liked it, but I could never get past the first chapter) and Treasure Island, our collective favorite. The idea of climbing aboard a ship to sail far away from the dingy orphanage captivated me and gave me hope for a better life once I turned 18. Grace, Peter, and I soon began to spin pirate tales of our own, complete with athletic sword fights, hordes of treasure made from stolen kitchen tin foil, and a ship created by pushing two old wooden bunk beds together for a stage. We’d even fashioned raggedy costumes from what spare clothes we had, and the kids loved it so much, they’d taken to calling me ‘Cap’ after my character, Captain Samuel ‘Grapeshot’ Roberts, the fiercest pirate this side of Barron County. Only Tarren got to call me Sammy, since she was still little, and Grace’s favorite.
But now, in the eerie stillness, the grinning skulls gave me goosebumps, and I realized how quiet it was without the power on. I fought the urge to whirl around and check behind me every few minutes, the hairs standing up on the back of my neck as Grace and I made our way toward the front entrance.
“See?” Grace shone her light on the wooden double doors in front of the reception desk, which bore thick metal chains wrapped twice around each handle, padlocked with three separate locks. “It’s like they wanted to be sure we couldn’t get out.”
My heart sank. Sunbright had bars on basically every window, to ensure no one got in or out that didn’t belong. If the front doors were chained shut, then we’d either have to pry them open, or find another way to escape. Still, it made no sense why the caretakers would just up and leave us like this, unless . . .
Something stuck in the back of my head, like a needle poking into my brain. “If they all left from the outside, then how did they lock these chains from the inside?”
Grace’s expression fell into a look of wide-eyed dread, and we both stared at each other.
Thunk.
Like clockwork, a soft noise echoed from down the hall to our left, and we both turned in unison toward the basement door. Access to the basement stairwell was heavily restricted, with only a few of the caretakers possessing keys, but Grace had managed to steal a copy a few years ago. There was nothing special down there, other than a tool bench for the janitor, storage for the legal files for the orphanage, and bulk food for the kitchen.
Shhhhh.
My ears prickled, and I took a step forward, opening my mouth and tilting my head to the side so I could hear better. It was faint, so faint I thought perhaps it was my mind playing tricks on me, but the sound came clearer the closer I got to the door.
Static. Heavy electronic static, like that from a radio without reception.
Thunk, thunk, thunk.
Something heavy and dense fumbled around in the unknown beyond the door, distant and muffled, but definitely real. It seemed to be just at the base of the stairs inside of the basement doorway.
“Maybe it’s another rat?” Grace’s whisper right behind my shoulder made me jump, her raven black hair hanging in loose strands around her pale face.
“Yeah, maybe.” I swallowed, though I doubted either of us believed that for a second. “I’ll check it out.”
Grace blinked at me, her mouth agape. “Seriously? You want to go down there?”
No, but I don’t want to stay here either.
Shaking my head, I gestured to the heavy chains on the door. “Like you said, someone had to have locked it from the inside. I doubt they just left it in the office. If anyone is still here, they have the key with them.”
Grace shut her eyes, and drew a short, shuddery breath. She hated dark tight spaces, always had, though she’d never told me why. Everyone at Sunbright had a past, usually some form of abuse at the hands of whoever abandoned them in life, and Grace never shared what had landed her in this dusty place. If the few scars I’d ever spotted on her shoulders and collarbone were anything to go by, I figured Grace wasn’t so much afraid of the basement, as much as who might be hidden in the shadows, waiting to lunge at her after all these years.
Summoning my courage, I reached over and gave her hand a squeeze. “You okay?”
She nodded without opening her eyes, but gripped my hand so tight it almost hurt. “Mmm-hmm. Let’s just get this over with.”
As bad as it made me feel to see her stoic face ripple with deeply hidden pain, the sensation of Grace’s hand in mine sent a pleasant warmth through me, and when she at last pulled it away, I missed the feeling.
Turning to the basement door, I tried the dented brass knob, and found that it turned with a soft, dry click.
The door swung open to reveal a dozen or so poured concrete steps that ended in a small corner, bathed with eerie yellow light from the basement beyond. I guessed that Mr. Ellis had his workbench lamp on, but something about the way the light flickered chilled me to my core, and I noticed a small dark smear on the landing.
I forced my legs to move, placing the worn soles of my old sneakers on each step with ninja-level precision, breathing as slow and quiet as possible so I could listen. No sound came now from the room below, no more thuds or static, and somehow that made me feel worse. It was like having a wasp in my room that I couldn’t see.
Each step made my heart race faster, and the closer I got to the bottom of the stairwell, the more my senses screamed at me to turn and run. A sickly-sweet stench hung in the air, rested on the back of my tongue, and burned with sour acidity in my throat. My skin went clammy, the flashlight in my hand shook, and a pulse roared in my ear. The light from beyond the stairwell dimmed, as if Mr. Ellis’s workbench was having a seizure, and in between the flickers, I thought I could discern the slightest twitch of shadow. Grace’s shadow followed behind me, and in the stony silence, more of that hushed static crackled forth, bobbing in and out of hearing range.
Grace squeezed my shoulder hard, and I stopped to look back at her.
Both silver eyes stared past me, and she pointed with a pale, trembling finger.
Wordlessly, I followed her gesture, and stifled a low curse at the puddle just beyond the final step.
Formed into a jello-like sludge that reminded me of synthetic automotive grease, the puddle reflected ambient light in ruby glints as it dried. Smears coated the lower pat of the wall, haphazard streaks of fingers, and even a solitary handprint. There was an inordinate amount for most things, but the deep crimson of the pool left me without a doubt as to what it could be.
Screw that.
I waved Grace back up the stairs, content to give up on my curiosity for good. Whatever was down here had my sixth-sense going off like a Geiger counter, and it had never steered me wrong before. No, something was very wrong, and I knew better than to try and turn that corner. We needed to get out of this place, run to somewhere with people, and pray they had answers for us.
Beep-beep-beep.
Grace and I both froze at the shrill call of a smoke alarm from somewhere in the offices above. The ones in Sunbright were old, battery powered, and tended to go off on their own. It had always been an annoyance, but now, it tolled like an executioner’s bell.
Shhhhh.
Static flared louder from down below, and a silhouette rose in the sickly yellow light reflected on the stairwell wall, unsteady and jerky, like a puppet with its strings partially cut. Something about it appeared vaguely human, but the way it twitched, hunched its shoulders, the arms moving in spasmodic jerks as if the person couldn’t decide what to do with its hands made my blood run cold. It’s head also didn’t seem to be the right size or shape, a hazy square perched atone the shoulders instead of a round skull, and two slender lines poked up from the top of it like sticks.
Shhhh . . . clap, clap-clap-clap, clap-clap-clap . . .
A strange, upbeat noise slithered through the air, the sound of human hands clapping through a speaker with a bouncy, jovial rhythm. Grace and I blinked at the shadow to the wall, too terrified to move.
“Lollipop, lollipop, oh lolli-lolli-lolli . . .”
From the static, a woman’s voice sang out, sweet and happy, three more female voices joining her as the chorus grew. But something about their retro tune seemed off, twisted, the static crackling in between some lines, the octaves warping at random moments, as if the speaker playing the song was about to go dead. Any other time, it would have struck me as absurd, some rickety old 50’s tune warbling from a broken radio somewhere, but in the dark, with that awful silhouette seizing in place, the song sent rivers of ice water through my veins.
I tightened my grip on the flashlight in my hand, painfully aware of how useless it would be against anything larger than a kitchen rat.
We have to get out of here.
With each successive line, the shadow stumbled, shrinking in size against the wall, and it hit me exactly why.
“Go.” I shoved Grace up the stairs, both of us abandoning all stealth as the figure lumbered closer to the bottom of the stairwell.
“. . . call my baby lollipop . . . tell you why . . . his kiss is sweeter than an apple pie . . .”
Heavy shoes scuffed at the concrete near the base of the stairs, and I sprinted for the door, Grace reaching to yank me through with wild eyes.
Her lower lip quivered, and she slammed the door shut with a force that rattled a nearby picture frame, slender hands scrabbling at the doorknob. “W-we have to lock it. Find something to jam it shut.”
“. . . sweeter than candy on a stick . . . huckleberry, cherry or li-ime. If you had a choice, it could be your pick, but lollipop is mi-i-i-ine . . .”
On the other side of the door, the song drew closer, dull thuds echoing on the stairs as though the person playing the radio crawled up on their hands and knees in a drunken stupor. My adrenaline surged, and I snatched a silver-colored letter-opener from the receptionist’s desk.
Sticking it into the loops on the basement door lock, I stepped back with Grace just as the door rattled in its hinges from a series of heavy slams on the other side.
“Guys! Sam, Grace, get up here!”
Peter’s voice rang out from the stairwell at the end of the dark hallway, and the world exploded around me.
I dragged Grace by the wrist as the basement door collapsed just behind us. Strange, metallic clanks skittered closer from outside the building, warbled voices, and screeching static, like a cascade of speakers on a loop. The stench of rot filled the air, and the horrified screams of the others rang overhead, along with the stampede of dozens of feet. Pale yellow lights flickered on the other side of the dark windows, and shadows blurred across the glass, reminding me of June bugs swarming toward a light bulb.
Swerving around to the stairwell, I let Grace pound up the steps ahead of me, and paused to look over my shoulder.
It only took a second to recognize the old denim jeans and neatly tucked plaid shirt of Mr. Ellis, his work boots polished with shoe grease, his brown belt tightened just-so. He moved with a twitchy shuffle-run, both arms swaying at his sides like the middle-aged tinkerer no longer knew what to do with them. I might have thought he was having a stroke, at his age, but the rivulets of red that spilled over his broad shoulders and plump belly dispelled any illusion, as did the shadow obscuring his round face.
No . . . not a shadow.
I stumbled on the stairs in shock, the peeling toe of my old sneaker catching on a step, and Grace hauled me up by one arm. The figure stumbled closer, that cursed song blaring in the dark, and my terrified brain finally accepted where the sound came from.
A radio. There’s a radio on his head.
Square, with old fashioned knob dials and a chipped silver paint job, the retro-style transistor clung to the upper half of Mr. Ellis’s head with four metal feet, their sharp edges burrowed into the skin of his temple with gory depth. The dial screen glowed from a flickering bulb somewhere inside the radio, and the two metal antenna swirled in spasmodic jerks, as if searching on their own for signal. Perched just above his nose, the device covered both Mr. Ellis’s eyes, and black wires wriggled just under the surface of his blood-smeared skin. There were dozens of them, behind his eye sockets, streaked down his lips, even twisted around the ears, prying deeper toward his neck and spine. Some poked from his nose, ears, and open mouth, the coppery tips swaying in the fetid air. Occasional sparks of blue electricity flared at the still-buried ends that sliced deeper, each one corresponding with a twitch of Mr. Ellis’s captive body.
From his slack-jawed mouth, the song played, over and over again in a haunting rhythm between bouts of static.
“. . . lollipop, lollipop, oh lolli-lolli-lolli, lollipop . . .”
“Run Sam!” Grace pulled on my clammy wrist and broke me from my paralysis. Up the stairs we flew, and the horrid visage of Mr. Ellis lumbered after, his greasy boots fumbling on every step.
Reaching the third-floor landing, I yanked on the stairwell door, and my heart did a flip-flop at the slab of rusty sheet steel refusing to budge.
No.
“Open the door!” Grace slammed her fist on the metal alongside me, the two of us frantic like cornered rats. “Open the freaking door, come on!”
Boots scuffed on the concrete, and I turned to see Mr. Ellis reach for me, his radio-covered head dripping blood, as the yellowish glow of the radio bore down like a meteorite.