Chela had expected the next sound to be Kelpie’s further rambling. It began as a whisper and soon became clearer as the wet slide of damp wood. As soon as the barricade on the other side released, Chela swung the door open in hopes of catching this Kelpie unprepared. The hallway was empty.
“Perhaps the door was speaking?” offered Alfred.
Chela was already in the hall, bolting after the Kelpie that spoke through doors, who vanished like paper turning in the wind and carried no footsteps while fleeing down a narrow hall where even her own roguish gait could not hide. It was upon turning the corner stairwell leading down when she stopped to look around. Alfred and Tabitha were peering after her from behind the open ward door. No, they weren’t watching her; they were looking upward.
The hall was narrow, barely wide enough for someone to walk through. It stretched down past their ward, branching into various other silent barred doors, ultimately ending plain and untempting. The walls were marred with pale wallpaper that curled downward, the glue behind having apparently succumbed to intense heat as evidenced by the char marks that reached up from beneath the floorboards. Patients and prisoners had once been filed down these corridors – little else would have fit. Following her companions’ sight, Chela found an unusual scene, even more-so given she fancied herself a student of the unusual.
Just overhead, a row of chairs lined one side of the hall, suspended from the ceiling, transfusion bags, recipients, and all. The chairs were not bolted, the patients not in any way restrained, just as they’d been in her ward… but inverted. Even the toxic bags seemed to have been emptied naturally without succumbing to the expected effects of gravity. Alfred leapt into the air and promptly landed back onto the ground. “Worth a try,” he said.