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But as awe-inspiring as the structure was, there was no dismissing its air of slumbering menace, as if a thousand sins and secrets loomed behind the chipped walls and smashed mullioned-glass windows. Gabrielle strode to where the light was best and took a few pictures. There was no current point of entry here; the main door had been bolted shut and boarded up tight. If she wanted to get inside to take interior shots - and she definitely did - she had to go around to the back and try her luck with a ground-level window or basement door.
She skirted down a sloping embankment, toward the anterior of the building and found what she was looking for: wooden shutters concealed three windows that likely opened into a service area or crawl space of the structure. The shutter's rusty latches were corroded but not locked, and they broke away easily with a little encouragement from a rock Gabrielle found nearby. She pulled the wooden covering away from the window, lifted the heavy glass panel, and propped it open with the window brace.
After a perfunctory sweep of her flashlight to make sure the place was empty and not about to cave in on her head, she shimmied through the opening. As she hopped down from the window casement, the soles of her boots crunched broken glass and years of accumulated dust and debris. The foundation of gray cinderblock bricks ran about four yards in, disappearing into the gloom of the unlit basement. Gabrielle shot the thin beam of her flashlight into the shadows at the other end of the space. She ran it back along the wall, holding the light steady when she came across a battered old service door bearing the stenciled words No General Access.
"Wanna bet?" she whispered as she approached the door and found it unlocked.
She opened it and shone some light around the other side into a long, tunnel-like corridor. Broken fluorescent light fixtures hung down from the ceiling; some of the panel coverings had fallen to the industrial-grade linoleum floor, where they lay shattered and dust-coated. Gabrielle stepped into the dark space, not certain what she was looking for, and a bit apprehensive of what she might find in the deserted bowels of the asylum.
She passed an open room off the corridor and her flashlight skimmed across a red vinyl dentist's chair, a little worse for wear, and poised in the center of the room as if awaiting its next patient. Gabrielle removed her camera from its case and took a couple of quick shots. She moved on, passing more examination and treatment rooms in what must have been the medical wing of the building. She found a stairwell and climbed two flights, pleased to find herself in the central tower where tall windows brought in generous amounts of soft morning light.
Through her camera lens, she looked out over wide lawns and courtyards flanked by elegant brick and limestone buildings. She snapped a few pictures of the faded glory of the place, appreciating both the architecture and the warm play of sunlight against so much ghostly shadow. It was strange looking out from the confines of a building that had once held so many disturbed souls. In the eerie silence, Gabrielle could almost hear the voices of the patients, people who had not been able to simply walk away like she could now.
People like her birth mother, a woman Gabrielle had never known beyond what she had heard as a kid through hushed conversations between social workers and the foster families who would, eventually, one by one, return her into the system like a pet that had proved more trouble than it was worth. She lost track of the number of places she'd been sent to live, but the complaints against her when she was bounced back were always the same: restless and withdrawn, secretive and untrusting, socially dysfunctional with self-destructive tendencies. She'd heard the same labels applied to her mother, along with the added distinctions of paranoid and delusional.
By the time the Maxwells came into her life, Gabrielle had spent ninety days in a group home, under the supervision of a state-appointed psychologist. She'd had zero expectations and even less hope that she might actually make another foster situation stick. Frankly, she'd been past the point of caring. But her new guardians had been patient and kind. Thinking it might help her cope with her emotional confusion, they had helped Gabrielle obtain a handful of court documents pertaining to her mother.
The young woman had been a teenage Jane Doe, presumably homeless, with no ID, and no known family or acquaintances, except for the newborn baby girl she had left, squalling and distressed, in a city garbage bin late one August night. Gabrielle's mother had been brutalized, bleeding from deep puncture wounds in her neck that had been made worse by her hysteria and panicked clawing at the injury. While she was being treated at the emergency room, she slipped into a catatonic state and never recovered.
Rather than prosecute her for the crime of abandoning her infant, the courts had deemed the woman incompetent and sent her away to a facility probably not much different from this one. Not a month into her institutionalization, she had hanged herself with a knotted bedsheet, leaving behind countless questions that would never have answers.
Gabrielle tried to shake off the weight of those old hurts but standing there, looking out the hazy glass windows, brought her past into tighter focus. She didn't want to think about her mother, or the misfortune of her birth, and the dark, lonely years that had followed. She needed to concentrate on her work. That's what always got her through, after all. It was the one constant in her life, sometimes all she truly had in this world.
And it was enough.
Most of the time, it was enough.
"Get a few shots and get the hell out of here," she scolded herself, bringing the camera up and taking a couple more photos through the subtle metalwork that was meshed between the double panes of glass in the window.
She thought about leaving the same way she had come in, but wondered if she might find another exit somewhere on the main floor of the central building. Going back down to the dark basement was not exactly appealing. She was creeping herself out with thoughts about her crazy mother, and the longer she lingered in the old asylum, the more her skin was beginning to crawl. She opened the stairwell door and felt a little better to see dim light filtering in through windows in some of the empty rooms and at the end of the adjacent hallway.
Evidently the "bad vibes" graffiti artist had made it in here, too. On each of the four walls, strange scroll-like symbols had been rendered in deep black paint. Probably gang markings, or the stylized signatures of the kids who'd been here before her. A discarded spray-paint canister lay in the corner, along with a smattering of cigarette butts, broken beer bottles, and other debris.
Gabrielle took out her camera and looked for a good angle for the shot she had in mind. The light wasn't great, but with a different lens it might prove interesting. She fished around in her bag for her lens cases, then froze when she heard a distant whirring noise coming from somewhere beneath her feet. It was faint, but it sounded impossibly like an elevator. Gabrielle stuffed her gear back into the bag, her ears tuned to the vague sounds around her, every nerve flooded with a chilling sense of foreboding.
She was not alone in here.
And now that she was thinking about it, she felt eyes on her from somewhere nearby. The prickling awareness raised the fine hairs at the back of her neck and sent a spray of goosebumps along her arms. Slowly, she pivoted her head and looked behind her. It was then that she saw it: a small closed-circuit video camera mounted in the shadowed upper corner of the corridor, monitoring the stairwell door she had just come through a few minutes before.
Maybe it wasn't working, just a leftover from the days when the asylum was still in operation. It might have been a comforting thought, except the camera looked too well-maintained and compact to be anything less than current issue, state-of-the-art surveillance. To test that idea, Gabrielle took a long step toward it, placing herself almost directly beneath the camera. Soundlessly, its base mount tilted, angling the lens until it was staring Gabrielle in the face.
Shit, she mouthed into that black, unblinking eye. Busted.
From deep within the empty compound, she heard the metal creak and crash of a heavy door. Evidently the abandoned asylum wasn't quite abandoned after all. They had security at least, and the Boston PD could take a few response-time lessons from these folks.
Footsteps pounded at a steady clip as whoever was on guard started coming for her. Gabrielle turned back into the stairwell and took off sprinting down the steps, her gear bouncing against her hip. As she descended, light grew scarce. She gripped the flashlight in her hand, but hated to use it for fear of creating a beacon for security to follow. She hit the last stair, pushed open the metal door, and plunged into the dark of the lower-level corridor.
Back on the stairs, she heard the monitored door swing open with a bang as her pursuer thundered down behind her, running hard and gaining on her fast.
Finally, she reached the service door at the end of the corridor. Throwing herself against the cold steel, she rushed into the dank basement, and raced for the small window that was open to the outside. A blast of fresh air gave her strength as she slapped her hands onto the casement and hoisted herself up. She vaulted through the window and tumbled onto the pebbled earth outside.
She couldn't hear her pursuer now. Maybe she had lost him in the dark twisting hallways. God, she hoped so.
Gabrielle shot to her feet and ran for the breached corner of the perimeter fence. She found it quickly. Diving to her hands and knees, she scrambled under the snipped section of wire, heart pounding in her ears, adrenaline jetting through her veins. She was too panicked: in her haste to flee, she scraped the side of her face on a rough edge of wire. The cut burned her cheek and she felt the hot trickle of blood running near her ear. But she ignored the searing sting and the bruising crush of her camera case as she wriggled on her belly through the fence and out toward freedom.
Once clear of the fence, Gabrielle leaped up and made a mad dash across the wide, rough lawn of the outer grounds. She spared only the barest glance behind her - long enough to see that the huge security guard was still there, having exited from somewhere on the ground floor and was now bounding after her like a beast straight out of hell. Gabrielle swallowed a knot of sheer panic at the sight of him. The guy was built like a tank, easily 250 pounds and all of it muscle, capped off by a large square head, his hair buzzed military style. The big man ran up to the tall fence and stopped at last, smashing his fist against the links as Gabrielle sped into the thick cover of trees separating the property from the road.
Her car was on the side of the quiet stretch of pavement, right where she had left it. With trembling hands, Gabrielle fumbled with the locked door, petrified that G.I. Joe on steroids might catch up to her yet. Her fear seemed irrational, but that didn't stop the adrenaline from pouring through her. Dropping down into the leather seat of the Mini, Gabrielle slammed the key into the ignition and turned over the engine. Heart racing, she threw the little car into drive, stomped on the gas pedal, and ripped out onto the road, making her escape in a screech of spinning tires and burning rubber.
