Nightmare by Robin Parrish Page B

terror. Just
how it is."

    I watched Jordin in amusement an hour later as her eyes tried
very hard to close themselves. She wasn't used to staying up all
night and it showed.
    But I had my reasons for requiring that we stay awake at least
until four a.m., which was still forty-five minutes away.
    Then, from the darkness down the long hall to our right,
came a voice.
    "Jordin!" I hissed, throwing my sleeping bag open.
    "Hm?" came Jordin's groggy voice.
    "Get up!" I whispered.
    Her eyes blinked wide, and she saw that I was already standing. She quickly grabbed her flashlight and joined me.
    "What is it?"

    "Shh!" I whispered.
    In the distance, the sound of a muffled cough could be
heard.
    I instinctively ran toward the sound, trying hard to keep my
feet from clomping on the cement floors. I was fifty feet down
the hall before I thought to look back and see ifJordin was following. To her credit, she was right on my heels.
    We slowed to a stop as we heard the sound again, and I threw
a warning hand injordin's face. Both of us fell completely silent
while the coughing went on for almost a full minute, as if someone in some distant room was having an asthma attack. It was
still far away, somewhere down at the farthest end of the facility.
I wasn't even sure it was on this floor, but we had to go after it.
    I'd never heard coughing at Waverly Hills before. I'd heard
voices, seen shadow people, picked up on lots of strange smells,
and experienced a dozen or so other odd occurrences. But this
was new.
    It made sense, though. Waverly Hills was a sanatorium for
tuberculosis patients, and fits of coughing were one of the most
prevalent symptoms.
    My heart pulsed hard, my face felt flushed, and sweat prickled
at my scalp beneath my thick black hair, even in this bitter cold.
The rush had me.
    Who had spoken? Who was coughing? Was it really a ghost?
Was it something else?
    Was I about to come face-to-face with a disembodied soul?
Would I be able to interact with it, touch it, and communicate?
    Could it tell me what it's like on the other side of the veil?
Could it explain what happens when you die?
    The sound grew as we neared the end of the hallway, more than three hundred feet from where we'd started. It had to be
coming from one of the patient rooms on either side of us, or
the last room straight ahead at the end of the hall.

    There was a scream. It was muffled, but it was there, and it
was close to us.
    We ran the last few feet and I pointed into the room on our
left.
    "Put a light in there!" I whispered. I did the same to the
room next door.
    On the left was an old elevator, closed up and not
functioning.
    As soon as our flashlights illuminated the rooms, the coughing and screaming stopped. All fell silent.
    I shined my light throughout the large, empty room, checking
every corner, every wall, the ceiling and floor. Nothing.
    I ran over to the room Jordin was in and repeated the procedure. There was nothing.
    "You're absolutely certain we're the only people in here?" she
said, raising her voice to full volume now that the commotion
had passed.
    "There's no way to be a hundred percent sure! It's a huge building situated on a massive plot of land. It wouldn't be that hard
for someone to sneak in, even under controlled conditions."
    She let out a long sigh.
    I kept talking. "But if the sound we heard was coming from
someone alive ... then where did they go?"
    Jordin looked around the room anew, her spirits rising. "The
sounds were definitely coming from somewhere down here. Had
to be in one of these two rooms," she agreed.
    I nodded. "I don't think it could have gotten past us."

    Jordin was grinning all of a sudden, no doubt feeling the
rush of having experienced something genuinely unexplainable.
"So what are you thinking? Residual haunt? That thing you said
where a place stores a recording of something that somebody did
while they were alive?"
    I walked outside and examined the doorpost. It was