“I really was on the fourth floor now. My body was mine again. The floor was completely empty now. No sacks of steaming muck. No whispers. It was just me. I tried to go out the main door but couldn’t. The locking system wasn’t working. The only way out was back the way I came. I headed back to stairwell and entered. The stairs were now clean also. It was like I had imagined everything. I knew that wasn’t true through. These were the emergency exit stairs. They lead down to each floor and then exited the building. The room I had woken up in previously shouldn’t have been there. No room like that existed in Crown Hill. That didn’t matter though. When I got to the bottom of the stairs the doorway leading to the hall of whispers was there. There was no exit to the outside like there should have been. I stepped through the doorway. Once through the threshold the room became freezing. The hairs on my arms shivered as I took more steps down the hall. The rooms were silent at least. Those whispers were worse than any form of screaming. I walked through the halls and found the room I had woken up in before. Looking at it shook me. The room was decrepit. It was covered in scum and mold. Things were growing out of the ceiling. The bed still had the frame of a bed but the mattress had a large opening cut out of it. Inside the opening was a ladder. A ladder leading down below the building, from an area that should never have existed in the first place. I would have called for help. I would have run. But I knew none of that would do any good. This place was keeping me here. It was giving me only one way out. Down the ladder. What waits for us beneath hell?”

We were both standing at the emergency stairs. The door was closed. We looked at each other. Neither of us wanted to go down there. My father had gone down there. I wished that he was wrong. I checked the entire floor with Melissa. There was no way out. Black smears on the floor were all that was left of the psych ward patients now. There was nothing left for us on this floor. We had to take the first step. If we stayed here something would find us for sure. Something worse might be down the stairs. But that was also where my father had headed. It was a bad choice, but it was the only choice.

I gave Melissa one last look. She nodded her head in approval. I opened the door. We had instinctively grabbed each other’s hands as we descended the stairs. We went down three flights of stairs before reaching the doorway. We opened it and went it. The cold he had described was gone. Instead it was sweltering hot. Our faces began dripping with sweat seconds into walking through the door. Our hands were wet with heat but we didn’t let go. I think we both thought that if we let go one of us would disappear. I didn’t want to go through this. We were both terrified. But we would be more terrified going through this alone.

We reached the room he had talked about. It wasn’t hard to miss. The dirty, moldy room he had described was the source of the heat. The ladder inside the bed was there. Above it we could see heat waves like the ones you see rising above the street in summer traffic. I never had questioned my decisions more than in that moment. Everything in my body told me to take Melissa from this place and go back to hiding in the closet. Dying of dehydration in that room would be a better end that the one we were heading towards. But some of me still had hope. Hope that we could beat this place and all its evils. I stepped forward with her towards the ladder. We looked down into it. That’s when Odom reached up from the hole with his fiery colored claw and grabbed me by the neck. He pulled me into the hole. I prayed that my grip on Melissa’s hand would slip. It didn’t. She was pulled down with me into the sweltering darkness below.