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Jace immediately took the camera and looked around through the lens; some sort of creeper had grown all over the top of the atrium, making it a claustrophobic, sunless little place. Wherever the pipes came out to drip rainwater into the gutter it had stained an unlovely brown, and there were more rickety stairs leading up into different parts of the hospital. She snapped a photo with a brief clik! and a flash, and drunk on excitement and a little bit of foreboding, she and Irelia passed through the squeaking door.

Inside was a lightless corridor, so dark that it seemed to be a bottomless pit. She extracted the torch from her backpack and flicked it on professionally; it didn't really make much of an impact, throwing beams over the place that didn't really penetrate.

"Don't worry," she said, "it's probably just somewhere teens come to make out. Betcha Antony'd love to be here to be kissing his hand." (She guffawed at her own joke.)

Jace had immediately started breathing slightly more heavily; she craned her head back as the darkness overtook them, dropping the torch and swearing underneath her breath as she kneeled down to try to pick it up. Although rattled, she flicked it on again and held it underneath her chin, rolling her eyes at Irelia; it didn't really make her feel any better at all. The place was goddamn terrifying.

So she took Irelia's hand and lead her down the corridor, fingers clutched around the other girl's a little too hard, until they came to another larger room that was a little dim from a window and outside light; less terrifyingly dark. Then again, shady and grey, shadows sat all over the room, over blocky shapes and weird grilles and the cold and unlovely metal that made up the walls. Their voices echoed weirdly inside.

She scanned her torch all over the room and dropped Irelia's fingers as the torch glinted on something; she went over to see. "Hey," she said. "Hey, c'mere, it's a map of the place."

"Seclusion Room," Jace read out, and the names underneath it -- "Ward One. Ward Two. Ward Three. Showers. Chapel. Theatre."

After that, the map had broken and peeled off. The entire room stank of decay. Things crunched underneath their feet; it was broken-down and leprous. "I wonder what the hell the seclusion room was," she wondered out loud. "I'm not chicken. I want to find out first. Seriously, it'll be upstairs, it'll be lighter."

Without asking Irelia's consent, she took her hand again and lead her over to another door -- pulled it open with a loud and ungrateful creak and started up peeling stairs, the windows giving filtering dim light into the stairwell, which dropped down into blackness and up into tired and worn-out walls. The stairs creaked as they walked up them.

The first door was labelled ward one. To Jace's surprise, there were still beds in there; high beds with high peeling sides, like cribs. In the pale light of the first room (the windows had been boarded off, but one of the boards had fallen off the first window, giving in some light) they saw how cracked everything was, the exposed and rotting rafters, the broken whitewashed walls, the general breaking-down destruction of everything that had once been a hospital. Winchester Insane Asylum, it had read on the map. Ugh.

The iron railings on the bed were rusting, too, making orange splotches everywhere. When Jace went to touch one, it fell off nearly immediately, rattling on the ground with an enormous bang! that made her jump. She laughed, uneasily, to cover it up, and then moved close to Irelia again.

"I guess the seclusion room must be at the end here," she said.

There were some rusted-up old wheelchairs in the corner as they progressed through the room, it getting darker and darker; the flashlight swept across the room like a schizophrenic car light, briefly illuminating the beds that were nailed to the floors and attached to poles all the way up to the roof; at the very end they came to the peeling, decaying old sign. SECLUSION ROOM.

In fact, if her Uncle Jack had been there present, he probably would have smacked her around for going into someplace that was rife for ghosts; but there was a chapel there, she figured, it couldn't be haunted. Old holy symbols and all that. The handle broke off in her hand when she reached for it; but then the door creaked open with an awful groan as it opened out for them, the Seclusion Room open.

It was obvious what it had been used for. It had been for the bad patients. The window was heavily barred and it was almost totally dark. Jace's heart was beating so hard in her chest she thought Irelia had to have been able to hear it; there was a single bed, bolted to the floor, covered in rotting leather straps. Attached to a post on the wall were some straps. There was a horrible old piece of equipment at the far end, which intrigued her enough through her rising fear; she dragged Irelia over to it to examine it. There were a couple of holes at the far end, one reading PATIENT. The other three read ELECTRODES.

Her torch scanned over one of the peeling walls, scabby with flaking paint: dark black paint marred the surface, graffiti, written with an ink pen maybe. It read in spidery writing:

NOT ALIVE

"What the ******** was only then that Jace started to really panic. The goddamn book was one thing, one really really creepy thing, but the scary a** dead eyes that weren't Irelia looking out and the muttering and the bloodied writing? That was some terrifying stuff. She immediately tried to remember every last thing that Jack had ever told her about ghosts, possessions and exorcisms, none of which she remembered. She didn't carry a cross. She didn't think "The power of Christ compels you!" if you had never been to church worked at all, on anyone. Jesus.

She shook at Irelia's shoulder bodily. Irelia was a dead weight, stuck to the ground; she didn't want to yank at her again in case she hurt her, but she was panicking, and how. She rubbed up against the words on the wall to see if she could make them go away -- nothing doing there either -- and pinched her nose. She needed to keep her ******** cool, for Rel, if nobody else.

"Irelia," she said. "C'mon, Irelia, snap out of it. Snap. Out. Of. It."

She crouched in front of her and tried to yank the book away. It was stuck fast in the sheep-girl's hands and Irelia wouldn't look at her, either, her dark curls falling down in front of her face as she wrote. "Come on, come on, come on," she hissed. "Oh, Jesus."

And just in case, she said out loud: "Iesu Criste!" in case it did anything. The ghost, if it was a ghost, was totally not impressed, and Irelia kept on writing.

Next time Jack spoke to her she was actually gonna pay more attention.

It was at this point that Jace's snap decision making abilities took over; they went hand in hand with pissing-yourself adrenaline glands overtime fun. She was not particularly sensitive to ghosts or mystical things or magic, despite having a magically crippled mother and a sister who seemed to be the embodiment of light and rainbow magic; what she did have was an innate ability to get out of Dodge. The door had slammed shut behind them with an ominous clang, rattling and echoing throughout the building, and Rel seemed frozen in fear. The shadowy figure in front of her was also making her palms clammy with sweat.

A lot of things happened at once; she dragged Irelia up bodily, hauling her like a sack of potatoes. The door did not give at first, so Jace raised one foot and hammered at it with her metal leg until the door started to crumple up from the force. Another few violent kicks and it opened back up again, whereupon she set Irelia down outside and nearly yanked her arm out of her socket dragging her behind her. The torch had been dropped: they were running in the dark.

"WHAT THE ******** WAS THAT?" Jace bawled, heading straight for the end of Ward One. The light had totally fled the upper rooms: even the window that had given light before was dark now, the chill in the air palpable. There were strange squeaks from the rest of the building: as though other doors were opening, as though something had woken up with the man who had lived and died in the Confinement Room.

At that point she pretty much wanted to rattle Irelia like a maraca. She swore again, swore in Spanish to make herself feel better, and barrelled down Ward One. An angry ***** murderer ghost was not exactly what they had come there for. They never got that crap on Scooby Doo. Maybe the chapel had been defiled or something; whatever, there was a ghost and it was after them and Rel had lost a couple of her marbles. Then again, after writing in ******** GHOST BOOK, she wasn't too surprised. What the hell?

"Jesus Christ," she said, and turned around; she slammed her shoulder into the door into Ward One, which had also shut on them, and to touch the metal was as cold as ice. It took more hammering with Jace's leg to make this one give, sweat beading on her forehead as she gripped Irelia's hand, kicking it viciously until it caved in on itself and they could run through. Going down the stairs in the dark was another thing altogether, and one wooden step gave out beneath her as she stomped down -- Jace fell, tumbled down to the first landing and lay there, winded.