Freelance and Fishmaids is a supernatural mystery novel, serialized in twelve episodes. This is Episode Nine of Season Two. Start Here.
Previously, Caroline wrestled with the secrets she’s keeping, and a haunting at a grocery store led to a dangerous revelation…
In this episode, Caroline and Reyville confront and confess, and the underground tunnels reveal their unsettling secret…
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For more tales set on Ferris Island, check out the Ferris Island Index.
The air over Ferris Island felt tangible, temperatures climbing well over the seasonal average. Like the gathering of stormclouds with no hope of breaking.
The Municipal Library in Port Salish was more crowded than usual, tourists and locals alike taking refuge in the brick building’s tentative and aging air conditioning which only managed to barely lower the temperature, but it was enough. The heat wave had struck Ferris Island viciously, all teeth, pushing the usual marine layer back westward to the ocean like warring packs of heavy-furred dogs.
Caroline sat in the study area, poring over the books she had grabbed, a crooked stack on the table beside her elbow. Her online research had turned up nothing, so she was hoping that someone, somewhere, had mapped the tunnel system under Hoodman’s Grocery Store. The library had a decent collection of books about island history, and she was pleased to see plenty of resources giving an overview of the building.
The tuberculosis hospital had been known as Barton Hill Sanatorium, after the wealthy benefactor who donated the money to build it in 1912. The name flipped a switch in Caroline’s mind; she remembered a Barton. Jim Barton, the first mayor of Port Salish, back when it was called Port George. But he died in 1888, so this must have been a relative.
Barton Hill was a very reputable facility. Clean, a decent record of successful treatments and happy patients. It helped that only the most wealthy could afford to live there, and therefore the funding for proper supplies and well-trained staff was second to none for the time period. The sanatorium ran smoothly until the forties, when an antibiotic cure for tuberculosis was finally developed. It closed and sat empty for about a decade, through World War II, until Hoodman’s moved in and renovated.
But despite all the historical literature about the place, and there was plenty, there were no maps or blueprints. A scattering of black and white photos, misty and unclear, of the sanatorium’s grounds and rooms. Some nurses and patients, caught candid and unsmiling with startled eyes like deer. But nothing about the tunnels. Not even a passing mention.
Caroline flipped through the books until her eyes felt dry and came up empty. She had scribbled a few notes on the pad of paper she brought, but had mostly resorted to filling the space with frustrated doodles.
Finally, she admitted defeat and walked the books back to their shelf. After putting them dutifully away, she headed for the reference desk where Miss Redding, the head librarian, was keeping a stern eye on the busy air conditioner-seeking crowd invading her library. She was dressed in all gamine black, as usual, with her white hair pulled tight on top of her head, spectacles hanging from a purple-beaded chain around her neck.
“Miss Redding?” Caroline said, adopting a humble tone. Always best, with librarians.
Miss Redding gave her an appraising look. “Miss Phelan. Ever a pleasure.”
It was certainly not, but Caroline smiled anyway. “I’ve got a…well, a niche question.”
“That’s what libraries are for.” Not a hint of humor in her tone, yet this was as close as the stern woman ever got to jocularity.
Caroline nodded. “Right. Well…Barton Hill Sanatorium. I’ve read through every single book and can’t find anything on the tunnels.”
Miss Redding blinked. “Tunnels?”
“Yes, the tunnels under the hospital. They connected the buildings together to make it easier to transport patients.”
She said this with a confidence she did not feel, echoing only what Hank had said, but Miss Redding nodded. “Oh yes, I’d heard something about that. They’re closed, now. When Hoodman’s moved in.”
“I know. But do you think anyone ever mapped them out?”
Miss Redding shrugged her thin shoulders. “If they did, I can’t imagine it was kept. Most of those old records were lost when the building sat empty for so long. Water damage.”
She paused, thoughtful. “You know…there’s one book you might not have checked. But it might not be what you’re looking for. Flowers on the Hill. You know it?”
Caroline shook her head. It definitely didn’t sound like a historical record.
“It’s in Memoir,” Miss Redding said. “Emily Barton was the writer.”
Barton. There’s that name again.
Caroline nodded and thanked the librarian. She headed away from her usual path, toward the Memoir section. It didn’t take long to find it. The slim off-white volume was vintage—late 1970s, maybe?—but still in pretty good condition. Clearly not a hot commodity on everyone’s reading list. It had that look that certain self-published books have, unadorned and to-the-point. But on the cover, under the title, was an old photo of Barton Hill Sanatorium.
Caroline looked at the back. The brief synopsis informed her that this book was the previously-unpublished memoir of Emily Barton, a former patient at Barton Hill when she was fourteen years old. That it was being published out of respect for her by her descendents, and that the proceeds would go to the then-newly-built Port Salish Hospital. The publication date read 1981.
Miss Redding was right; it was a long shot, for what she was looking for. But if there was even the slightest chance Emily Barton mentioned the tunnels in this memoir, it was worth looking into. She checked out the book and left the cool of the library, out into the rippling heat of the late afternoon.
*******
The Princess of the Weathers tilted gently in her usual slip at the Port Salish Harbor. Reyville boiled the kettle for tea, and despite the comfort of the ritual the extra heat and steam were unwelcome; the open doors and portholes along the length of the cabin weren’t helping at all, and the breath off the water was stodgy and thick.
Caroline sat at the small galley table and flipped through the book, Flowers on the Hill, furrow-browed, sweating in her long sleeves. The memoir wasn’t necessarily going to win a Pulitzer, but it was simply written and sweet, just a young woman’s account of a strange time in her life, written a few years removed from her stay at Barton Hill. It was one part diary and one part poetry, the way so many things are at fourteen: a mix of keenly-felt observation and gilt-edged fantasy, with barely any room in between. Emily described the people she knew with both sensitivity and humor, the staff and patients alike. She talked about the daily routine at the hospital as if it were the timetable at a convent: with reverence, and a bit of occasional cheeky humor when rules were broken. And according to Emily, breaking the rules was a typical part of the fun when you were stuck in a sanatorium.
But for all that, as Caroline suspected, there wasn’t much to chew on as far as the exact particulars of the place. Emily would mention certain key areas: the garden, the dining room, the small hospital library…but gave no real indication of where these places might be in relation to each other. And no tunnels. Not even a whisper.
“Any luck?” Reyville asked, handing her a steaming mug. He was on-call for Dan the Harbormaster and wearing the short-sleeved version of his Harbor Staff uniform, a button-up blue shirt that brought out his eyes, the gold of his hair and trimmed beard. Caroline found herself unreasonably fascinated by the strong curve of his bare forearms, usually hidden by his sweaters and peacoats.
Get a grip, Phelan.
“Emily Barton was a sweet girl, but she could never have known how much a stranger reading her book a century later would wish she cared more about architecture.” Caroline set the book down, slipping a napkin into the place where she left off, and rubbed her eyes. “And it’s too hot to think.”
“You’re wearing long sleeves in a heatwave,” Reyville observed, in what was a less-joking tone than Caroline would have expected. “Worried about sunburn indoors?”
She shrugged, sipped her tea. “Too focused to dress properly, I guess.”
A lame excuse, but she breezed past it. “Emily and her friends clearly had the run of the place. They snuck out at night to this secret spot in the hospital rose garden and got up to shenanigans. Relatively innocent shenanigans by today’s standard, but…you know. Kids will be kids.”
She opened the book again, scanned through the page. As she did so, a question bubbled up in her brain, something bolder than her usual, something she knew could go either way. But it wanted asking.
“Did you…ever visit Barton Hill?” she asked. “You know…back then?”
Reyville looked at her, and those blue eyes searched her face for a moment before he said, “What year was this?”
“1912.”
He considered, then shook his head. “No. Thomas never made it to the island.”
She blinked at him. “Thomas?”
“Me. Then. Thomas. I was nineteen and still in Lancaster in 1912. Thomas never made it to Ferris Island. He died in the First World War.”
It was strange, listening to Reyville speak of himself in third person. But he said it casually as if describing the plot of a book. And Caroline could see him, all of a sudden, a name to one of the faces in her visions: Thomas, in his uniform. Thomas, on the battlefield. Thomas, bloodied and…
“They all had different names?”
He laughed. “Of course they did, Caroline. They were all different men. Me, sure, but not me. Raised different, loved or neglected different. Molded by their time.”
Caroline wrapped her mind around this slowly.
“It’s really tough,” she said, “thinking of you…dying. Like that.”
Reyville shrugged. “We all die.”
“Sure, but…” Caroline suddenly felt the tidal pull of confession, Reyville’s face the moon in a hazy heatwave sky. “Not like that. Not like…”
Emotion clamped its jaws on her throat. “Reyville, I’ve seen them. Your deaths.”
He watched her carefully. “How’s that?”
She sighed. The action came to her before thought, and she gently pulled off her long-sleeved top. She sat there in her bra, brown skin breathing a sigh of relief as the sweat cooled. The welts on her arm were still visible, though faded. She turned slightly, so that he could see. He barely moved.
“The Sisters,” he said, quietly.
She nodded. “They…show me visions. When I touch certain things, people. Visions of pasts.”
“Scully,” he said, putting pieces together. “Longshank. Me.”
She nodded.
Then, his face visibly paled. “So, when you asked to kiss me…”
“No,” she said, shaking her head quickly. “No, I wanted that. I really did.”
“But you…got something out of it that I didn’t,” he said, with a sad smile, scar pulling the corner of his mouth like a cord. “Didn’t you.”
It wasn’t a question. She nodded again, shame rising to her cheeks.
“How much did you see?”
She couldn’t be sure. “Bits and pieces of your lives. And I saw your deaths,” she said. The visions were still fresh, still throbbing like the germ of a headache before it rises. The pain emboldened her anew. “And I can’t bear to think of you repeating again.”
She paused, searching for the right words, and then decided to leap. “Flora can help. She said she could.”
“You told Flora?” His voice dropped in tone, laced with shock.
“No, I didn’t have to. She knew.” The words slipped out, fast. “She already knew about you, and about this, and she…she can cure it. All she needs is to test you. It’s no more invasive than a blood test.”
Reyville laughed, caustic in a way Caroline had never heard from him, before.
“You believe that, do you?” he said. “You believe Flora Burnside is out to rescue me from myself? Caroline, think. From the moment that woman walked into our lives you’ve been defending her, desperate to turn her into a friend, because you see something of yourself in her. But she is not your friend. She does not care about us, you and me. She cares about only one thing: her research. She’ll put her own mum in harm’s way before she gives up on whatever she’s after.”
Caroline was not used to hearing Reyville rant, and the words piled up on the table between them as if he had been holding them in for a long, long time.
He continued, and sorrow had crept in, between breaths. “You can’t ask me to do this. Not after…not after the long years I’ve spent, desperate for a cure. Wanting it to end. And now, with you, I’ve finally found someone worth living for. Worth spending the rest of my days savoring, no matter what comes next. I made peace with it, finally. Finally! And you go and…you go and ask me to do this…”
He raked a hand through his hair and stood, pacing away from her, while she sat stricken at the table, staring at his back.
The words echoed in the canyon of silence between them:
With you, I’ve finally found someone worth living for.
No matter what comes next.
“Reyville…” she said, but he shook his head, still not looking at her.
“You should go,” he said. “I need to be alone, for a little while.”
She was stunned. He had never dismissed her before, never. Had never asked her to leave. Had never pushed her away. She had done it to him plenty. She almost didn’t understand the words; they were foreign, coming from him.
But she obeyed, because she loved him, and the idea of causing him more pain was a physical ache in her gut. She put her shirt back on, collected up her things, set the untouched tea on the small galley countertop, and left the trawler’s cabin without another word, without a backwards glance.
Despite the oppressive heat, the watchful eye of the sun, she was shaking violently all the way to her car, the way a child trembles after accidentally breaking something very, very precious.
*******
The pain calcified into focus, the way it used to when Caroline was a journalist. When something was too strong to feel, she would turn it into desire for knowledge, ricocheting violently away from the sting. It had always served her well, then. Perhaps it could, again.
After she left the Princess she went straight home to the cottage, throwing herself on the bed and digging with fresh fervor into Emily Barton’s book. She was already a fast reader but she pushed it, skimmed, devoured the book in bites. The cottage ghost watched from a careful distance, perched on the headboard of the bed, out of the fray.
She wasn’t really sure what she was looking for until she found it.
It was the secret place in the garden. Emily spoke of it often, a place where she and the rest of the teenage patients would gather to play cards, trade contraband sweets, even kiss and touch. But it wasn’t until over halfway through the book that Emily spoke of the secret place as being a door. A door leading underground.
“We are not discovered down there, but we dare not go too deep,” she wrote. “So many spiders and crawly things—it does not bear thinking about! So we stay near the surface and listen for the ghosts of our voices to echo back to us.”
This was enough. It was enough for Caroline to go on. A start; that’s all she wanted.
She waited until dark, until Hoodman’s was surely closed for the evening, until the traffic was stilled and the oppressive heat only slightly soothed by the night, and then she got into her car and headed back to Port Salish, windows rolled down to let the breeze blow through, ditching the long sleeves for a tank top.
She didn’t need to cover up, anymore. All had been revealed, anyway.
She parked her car on a side-street a block away from Hoodman’s to avoid the inevitable security cameras and walked around the corner, approaching the building from the back. The property was deceptively large, considering the grocery store only made up a small fraction of it. At the back of the store, the old outbuildings from the hospital had been turned into various storage spaces, warehouses, and barns for the delivery trucks. Caroline tried to picture in her mind’s eye where the garden would have been, as Emily Barton had known it. It was a little tricky—after all, a handful of buildings had been razed and relocated since 1912—but she pinpointed the spot as a grassy rise, fenced in with KEEP OUT signage all around it.
Thankfully, the effort was all bark and no bite. The fence was old, the chain rusted. Caroline shuffled it aside easily, made just enough of a gap to squeeze through. The grassy rise was unlit, and it took Caroline a moment to realize that the “garden” was an old cemetery.
Emily and her friends had been sneaking out to play among the graves.
Caroline looked around for the door, anything that could suggest an old entrance hidden under the overgrown grass and encroaching blackberries. She passed crumbling headstones, grave markers untouched since the early 1900s, until she came at last to a small mausoleum, unmarked, and tried her luck, pushing her way inside. The door creaked open to allow her in, and she realized that this was not a real mausoleum, but a folly; a disguised entrance, and a well-maintained stone staircase leading down, down into the black.
The voice of reason was not fully dead within her. She knew she should call Reyville, should wait for his help. But the pain of his dismissal, the pain of his wounding, was now fully bone, unyielding, and she could not bring herself to do it.
Only a quick look, she thought. And then I’ll go back.
*******
It did not smell the way she expected it to smell. That was her first surprise.
Any tunnel sealed for half a century should smell musty and old, but this tunnel smelled like…nothing. Fresh air, flushed regularly enough. Caroline knew this was strange, but did not allow herself to think why.
She followed the only path there was to follow, using her phone flashlight to illuminate what would have been absolute darkness. She noted that the tunnel around her was very professional and well-crafted, not in any obvious disrepair. As she continued on, there was a sound, thrumming, recurrent; running water? Small paths off the tunnel twisted away from her, crowded with cobwebs, but she kept on down the main arterial, as though she knew it was the only way forward.
After a few twists and turns she came to the first bulb in the ceiling, a little globe of incandescent light. A gentle shock in the gloom. There was another one further on. And another.
Caroline put her phone away and continued, following the lights to the end.
The end was a steel door, stamped with the mark of the black lion’s head.
That still, small voice of reason gave its swansong:
Go back, Phelan.
Go back. Don’t do this.
But it wasn’t in her to turn around. Not now.
She pushed the door, and to her surprise it swung open to receive her.
This new brightness stunned her and she stood unmoving for a moment as her eyes adjusted. She had reached a long, wide room of cold stone brick, the ceiling a bit higher, here, lit brightly with modern fluorescent bulbs. The space was peppered with desks and computer kiosks, lab stations and room dividers. All of them current tech and recently-used. Soft monitors beeped, but mostly the room was quiet except for that sound of running water, constant.
There were other doors at various points around the room, leading away to who-knows-where, but only one door piqued Caroline’s interest. It was one marked SPECIMENS.
Pushing herself onward with a shiver of portent she wove through the desks and stations, past empty glass flasks and darkened monitor screens, to the SPECIMENS door. And when she opened it, the horror of it left her mute. Numb.
In this wide section of long tunnel, low ceilinged and dimly lit, there were cages and tanks of various sizes and shapes lining the walls, crowded, a jumble. Birds and beasts of all kinds, many that she recognized, some she had never seen before. Sad-eyed hounds. Fishmaids in murky water. Reptiles and insects. Feathers and fur.
And people. There were people in cages.
At the sight and sound of the door opening the crowded room erupted into chaos. The animals squawked, the birds fluttered, the fishmaids slapped the glass with their tails. Eyes turned to look at Caroline, wide and surprised and hungry, and she saw—among the terrified faces—Longshank, in his wizened form as an old man, gripping the bars of his cage with his thin hands.
“Go,” he hissed, eyes wide with sincerity. “Go now, go running, before the Dark Lion sees you.”
But Caroline was frozen in place, paralyzed by the horror and the smell of spent food, stale urine, blood…
And she did not hear the footsteps behind her until it was too late.
She whirled, and came face to face with Flora.
Those brown eyes—guileless, trustworthy, a friend, a friend—were full of sorrow, enough to make the heart shatter.
“Hello, Songbird,” Flora said, sadly.
Caroline barely let out a whimper before Flora reached out, overpowering her. She tried to kick out, flail with her arms, but surprise had been on Flora’s side. Caroline felt the pinch of a needle in the side of her neck, opened her mouth to scream, but the underground walls and the chaos of the room of cages swallowed the sound.
Haze, limbs softening as she slipped away. And over it all, Flora’s mournful voice, like a dirge, like the rumble of the storm finally breaking:
“I warned you, so long ago, to leave it alone. Why couldn’t you just trust me, Caroline, and leave it alone?”
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Not going to say I told you so, but I always had my doubts about Flora.
Late 1970s is vintage? Really? I need to go lie down now...
Bloody hell.
Why does Caroline always do something dumb after they have a disagreement?
It's going to be a looooong week while we wait for the next installment!
Terrific nail-biter of a chapter!