The Arrival | The House of Voices #3

Twenty Five - Easy

Easy

The feeling of dread grew stronger as we followed the Warden down wide, white corridors and up the stairs to his office on the third floor. He said he wanted to talk things over, first.

I didn’t know why I was so worried. Things were going smoothly, I should have been thrilled. But that was the problem. Nothing ever went exactly as planned for me. Everything that had happened since the guard outside had called the Warden seemed too good to be true;

Too easy.

I felt a wash of cold and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. For a moment, I worried that maybe I’d let my barriers slip again, and that the Voices had managed to get into my head again. But then I felt a tingle of comfort and knew it was Claudia who had found her way in, not the Voices.

But, she wasn’t in the best of moods herself, so I wasn’t sure if her presence was a good thing.

The hall was wide enough for the three of us to walk side-by-side, me sandwiched in between Ace and Spade. The Warden led the way to his office, two hefty guards following behind the fake detectives at a leisurely pace.

The third floor, according to the blue prints Spade had gotten for us, was the floor which held the most unstable of the patients in St. Elizabeth’s. When we’d been going over the blueprints, trying to come up with a proper plan to get Parish out of the hospital, we’d guessed that he’d most likely be in one of the rooms on the third floor.

A part of me hoped we were right and that he was on the third floor. Another part, though, wondered if that might have made the situation even stranger than it was. Too easy. Why was everything so easy?

The Warden stopped in front of a door and pulled out a key. There was a plaque nailed to the top of the door that read, “Dr. Lipnicki, Warden”.

As he unlocked the door, Kara’s words came back to me. Don’t question good things.

I tried to take her advice.

The Warden pushed the door to his office open and gestured for Spade and Ace to go in first. Nodding politely to him, they did, gently tugging me along with them.

“So, detectives,” he started, closing the door behind him and moving to sit in the tall chair behind the desk. “What exactly do you plan on doing, if the boy actually gives you any information regarding the girl’s parents?”

“We’ll contact them,” Spade answered, crossing his arms over his chest. “Tell them where we found their daughter and inform them that she’s here. After that, it’s up to them what happens to her. Either they’ll decide she needs to stay here, or they’ll take her home. But that’s out of our hands.”

“I see,” The Warden touched his mustache and leaned back in his chair. Beside me, I felt Ace stiffen and Spade’s arm twitch. They’d noticed something I hadn’t. “And what about the boy?”

“What about him?” Ace asked, frowning. Her face shimmered a little in my vision, and for a moment, she looked like herself again. Tall and dark skinned, her bright green eyes watching the Warden carefully.

“Are you going to try and contact his parents as well?”

Ace shrugged and looked at Spade. “Don’t see any need to,” she said. “From what we gather, his parents are the ones who called you to find him, I take it they already know what’s going on. No reason for us to meddle around here.”

“Well, then,” The Warden clapped once, and then lifted himself out of the chair. Rounding the table and moving to open the door he said, “I don’t see why we can’t ask the boy what he knows. Maybe he’s feeling a little more cooperative today.”