Doors lined each side of the corridor. Some stood open. Others hung in pieces, the wood rotten and decayed. More light flickered from beyond some of the doors, suggesting this corridor wasn’t the only one to have power.
Dark puddles covered parts of the floor, fed by the constant drip-drip-drip of water that leaked through the decomposing ceiling tiles. At least, I hoped it was water. The rest of the floor, where the puddles didn’t reach, was a mess of debris and junk.
Soiled bandages and dirty syringes lay scattered around my feet. The half-melted head of a plastic doll stared up at me from within a nest of surgical gauze. I swung back my leg and booted the thing as far along the corridor as I could. I’ve found you can never be too careful when it comes to creepy-looking dolls.
Hungry, hungry, hungry! the voices behind the barricade screamed. Hungry, hungry, hungry!
That was it. I’d seen and heard enough. I had missed some of what Joseph had told me, but I remembered him saying I wouldn’t be able to get back. It was time to put that to the test.
I’d become pretty good at flitting between the Darkest Corners and the real world. It didn’t take much effort now. I used to have to really concentrate, but now I could make the jump just by thinking about it for a few seconds.
Still, I was taking no chances this time. I shut my eyes, tried to block out the crashing and howling from the entrance, and focused like I’d never focused before.
It happened in a heartbeat. The decaying walls around me appeared to heal, as the real world rushed in to replace the festering wound that was the Darkest Corners.
The sunlight that came streaming in through the windows burned away the stuttering shadows. I looked around. The barricade was gone. The filth and the rot were gone.
But Ameena was there. Ameena and Joseph. Her face crinkled into a grin when I appeared beside them. Joseph’s expression barely changed – just a raising of his eyebrows in the middle, and a slight widening of his eyes. It wasn’t a look that suggested he was pleased to see me.
From that look alone, I should have realised something wasn’t right, but I didn’t. I smiled cockily back at them, telling myself that Joseph was just unhappy at having been proved wrong—
A bomb went off behind my eyes and I saw blood splatter on the floor at my feet. The pain crippled me, making my body go limp. I dropped to my hands and knees, my muscles spasming, rivers of red flowing from each nostril and down over my mouth and chin.
I tried to scream, but the blood was flowing down my throat. I coughed, spluttered, hacked – choking on the stuff, drowning in it.
The second jolt of pain was worse than the first. It hit me like a hammer-blow to the side of the head. The force of it took my arms and legs out from under me.
I landed, face down, in a grimy puddle.
Hungry, hungry, hungry. Hungry, hungry, hungry!
The pain eased off and the blood stopped flowing. I coughed up a wad of dark red and left it floating in the water. I didn’t move for over a minute, just knelt there, staring at my bloodied reflection flickering off and on in the puddle. There one second, gone the next.
I didn’t have to look to know the barricade was there. There had been no flashing sparks, no sensation of movement – nothing to signal I was flitting between worlds. But I was. I had. I was back in the Darkest Corners. And it looked like I was stuck there.
At long last, I stood up. I looked at the spot where Ameena had been standing. Where she was still standing, a whole world away. She’d be shouting at Joseph now, demanding to know what had just happened. The thought of it almost made me smile. Almost.
The corridor went dark. For a few seconds I could see nothing. The crashing of metal and the screeching of the creatures outside sounded louder and closer in the sudden darkness, but I didn’t dare run. With no light to see by, I could bump into anything, and I didn’t imagine there was anything good to bump into in here.
Then, as I’d begun to wonder if the lights would ever come back on, they did. All four of them resumed their random blinking and flashing, offering me at least a partial view of the corridor.
I kept my back to the barricaded door. Going that way was out of the question. The only route open to me, it seemed, was down the corridor, further into the hospital.
I peered along it, at the filth and the rot and the dark pools of shadow. More than anything I did not want to go that way. More than anything, I knew I had to.
Ameena and Joseph had mentioned a cure – a cure that could only be found in the Darkest Corners. Was that why Joseph had brought me here? Was the cure here in the hospital? It made sense, but that was what worried me. Nothing about the Darkest Corners normally made sense.
But still, if there was a cure, then I would find it. What other choice did I have? Being stuck here – being trapped for ever in the Darkest Corners – was unthinkable.
I took a few big, bold steps along the corridor, then stopped. What was I doing? Joseph had also said there was somebody in the hospital. Somebody worse than anyone I’d crossed paths with before.
I thought of Mr Mumbles, Caddie and the Crowmaster. I couldn’t believe there could be anyone worse than those three. But what if Joseph was right? If there was something even half as bad as any of the monsters I’d faced so far, I was in real trouble. Back there, back in the real world, I could do things. I could stop them. Here, I was just a kid. Here, I was powerless.
Here, I was as good as dead.
Ameena would know what to do. She’d come up with a plan and find a way to make it work. But Ameena wasn’t coming. No one was coming. I was trapped in a big scary hospital in a big scary world, and I was on my own.
Squeak.
Squeak.
Squeak.
The sudden sound made me jump, and I gave a little yelp that only reminded me how scared I was. The squeaking had come from... where? Somewhere along the corridor, I thought, but it had an echoey quality, suggesting it might have come from further away.
I stood still, listening, not daring to make a move. Even the things outside had fallen silent, and were no longer battering against the barrier. The sound didn’t take long to come again – a high-pitched squeak-squeak-squeak like some sort of machine badly in need of oiling. There was another sound too, behind the first one. It took me a moment, but I soon identified it. Footsteps, slow and steady, clack, clack, clack.
Joseph was right. I was wrong. I may have been trapped in a big scary hospital in a big scary world, but now I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was definitely not on my own.
Ilistened again for the squeaking and the footsteps, but heard them only once. They were further away this time, somewhere deeper within the hospital, and I decided it was finally safe to... to...
To do what? I was at a loss. From what I’d seen of it from the outside, the hospital was enormous. Finding a cure – if there even was one – would be virtually impossible. Would it be a pill? A drink? An injection? Some kind of machine? How could I look for it when I didn’t even know what it was, let alone where it was?
Why hadn’t Joseph given me more to go on? Why hadn’t he told me anything useful? Time had been running out, but that hadn’t stopped him before. On Christmas Day, when I’d been running from Mr Mumbles, Joseph had somehow slipped