Silence seemed to greet this.
“It’s up Barker Road. About three miles. In the woods.”
“That’s on the mountain,” Larry said.
“They closed a long time ago,” the girl told them.
“Was it because of the boy who died?” Amanda asked, but the girl didn’t answer.
Outside, Larry was apparently gearing up to go with her, checking the bottoms of his walking shoes and stretching his legs.
“Would you like company?” he asked.
“Yes, please,” Amanda said, relieved.
“Lions, tigers, and bears?”
“More like I’m afraid of getting lost.”
“Don’t blame you. There’s lots of old logging roads in these mountains, and some of them lead nowhere. It’s easy to get looped around and lost.”
“Don’t tell me,” she said with a shudder.
They walked up the old blacktop road. The cleanup truck clearly didn’t make it out here often, as fallen pine trees, both old and new, littered the cracked pavement. The trees were deep around them, and they could hear sounds in the brush. Elk, maybe, or deer. Birds tittered.
Larry had the sense of climbing higher. Away from the clamor and wind of the beach, the air here felt balmy and soft. The salt wind whispered in the trees, and Amanda became aware of just how quiet it was, outside of the birds. A distant plane droned, but other than that, there was silence.
The three miles began to feel like ten, going uphill. Larry trudged quietly, taking care with his knees. He was starting to wonder if they had taken the wrong road when they saw a large building rising out of the trees. It looked like a dot of gray on a green felt background.
The sign at the front gate warned them.
brightwood, a place for healing, it said. And under that, in newer letters,no trespassing.
The gate was rusted and old; a broken padlock hung off a chain. Amanda pushed it open. A decaying drive greeted them, overgrown with tufted grass that had broken through the pavement.
The place was much bigger than Larry had imagined. A prison, not a home.
The front yard was snarled with wild manzanita bushes. Wild blackberries had grown over them in a crusted mantle. Larry and Amanda stepped carefully across a rotting porch to the front door, which was green with mold.
caution. danger. unsafe building, said an ancient notice bolted to the door. Underneath, someone had writtenEat shit.But most of the building was clean of graffiti, Larry noticed. Not enough teenagersaround, he thought. As Amanda opened the door, Larry reached for a weapon, instinctually. His hand fell to his side, empty.
The door creaked, and a cold draft coiled down the hall and blew against their legs. The air was rancid. There was decay and mildew and something bitter, like swollen weeds.
“Careful,” Larry warned her. “The floor could be rotted.”
He went in first, taking the lead, Amanda following him as they walked down the tiled hall. There was a closed door that saidofficeand one next to it that saiddirector. Amanda cautiously pushed them open. The rooms were thick with darkness. Abandoned desks crouched in the corners, and the windows seemed furred with moss.
The smell got ranker the farther into the building they went. Larry proceeded slowly, feeling each step. The last thing he wanted was for them to fall through to the basement. He could almost feel it simmering below them, full of water from leaks and broken sewer pipes.
He looked at Amanda, wondering how she was feeling.
At the end of the hall was a narrow stairway. They took this, climbing carefully, to a landing where a broken window looked over the unbroken forest. The trees were like a serene blanket. Or a fence, Larry thought.
Down the hall of the second floor was a stretch of dormitory-style rooms, each impossibly small, with the black marks of cot legs on the floors. The windows were little more than narrow slots, and some rooms had no windows at all. Those rooms whispered of a darkness older than time.
The floor began to feel spongier, and Larry stopped. He signaled to Amanda, and they retreated back to the stairwell. There was no way of knowing which room Dennis had lived in. Larry was filled with questions. Why had the boy been at the beach that day? How had he gotten there? Hadn’t he seen the warning signs? There was so much they didn’t know.
They began to climb to the third floor. The stairwell felt narrower, and steeper. The ceiling was lower up here, and the bedrooms were even smaller and more cramped than those on the second floor, as if they had been built into what was originally an attic. Larry stopped Amanda, signaling that it was unsafe.
