The Loving Silence

Chapter 48

They didn't dare touch him, lest they caught something. Given the barren ground and the many rodents, it wasn't likely to be safe. They knew they couldn't avoid reporting all of this to the police, so it was best to leave everything as they found it.

A little ways from the incinerator, there were many black garbage bags placed in piles. Marcus ran out to the van to grab some gloves and a mask, before he dared look inside.

"It's... clothes. Hospital garments. They say 'Property of Fallen'."

"It can't be their laundry, can it? Not like this, all the way down here?" Lune wondered.

"It doesn't seem like anyone wants to say it out loud, but I think we're all thinking it. The incinerator, the plot outside, it must've been how they dealt with their dead. And the clothes... something must have happened here. Something very bad. Either they all got sick at the same time, or–"

"Or times were changing and they decided to cover their tracks." Bly finished for him.

"Exactly."

"So my grandmother might be scattered in this place? A bit of her here and a bit of her there? Like she wasn't even human," Rue asked, his voice breaking. To imagine that his grandmother, the angel of a woman he had seen on his own death bed, had met her ending in a place like this... it broke his heart. "How can we give them justice? How can someone even begin to piece them together?"

Mica wrapped his arms around him. "I don't know, son. I wish I had the answers, but this is far worse than I could have imagined. We'll sort it out though. I know people still, people whom I considered to be my colleagues at one point. We'll call for them, and they will call for the police. It will be up to them to sort it out, but we won't give up until these people - and your family members - have been given justice and peace. Before they receive the respect and care they deserve."

"They must have been so lonely in this place. So scared. Those poor souls." Rue sobbed quietly.

The floor in the cellar was filthy, with dirt, dust, waste and rat droppings lying wherever you turned. There was a staircase at the right side of the room. They decided to venture upwards and see what else they'd find before they'd call for someone. In their minds, they were all praying there were no more dead people waiting upstairs.

Though the building had seemed most grand from the outside, and it may have been once, the inside was anything but. There were no colours anywhere. It looked like they'd entered a black and white movie. The windows had been covered with screens, and so there was no light coming in. They had to light their way with the flash lights from their phones. Unlike the rooms at the other institution, there were no glass windows to the doors. And inside, there were no lights. The patients would have been surrounded by darkness day and night.

Some of the rooms were padded, and some had all sorts of contraptions that none of them wanted to let their minds linger on. It seemed the patients had been tortured in more ways than one.

There was no lunch room, so they had to assume the patients ate in their rooms or not at all. How they could eat in complete darkness was anyone's guess.

In what seemed to be one of the offices, there appeared to have been electricity once. Along with a heater, there was also a fan, a kettle and other measures of comfort. A far cry from the squalor and misery their patients lived in.

If they lived in darkness, and they were not allowed to leave their rooms, not to eat or relieve themselves, it was possible they didn't even know where they'd been taken. Or that there were others there, brought there against their own free will, just as they had been.

How had Johnna gone through a whole pregnancy in that environment, and how was the child delivered?

Before they decided they'd seen enough, more than their hearts could bear, they managed to find a storage room. Wall to wall, it was full of shelves. One of them was even leaning on one of the others, as if it had been searched through so vigorously it had tipped over. There were papers scattered on the floor, and large trash bags in the corner. There were ashes too, piles of them, so it seemed likely they had indeed endeavoured to hide what they'd been doing, and for how long they'd been doing it.