The Tooth Collector (and Other Tales of Terror) by Lindsey Goddard Page B

the old hospital building. Barred
windows, set high into the walls, were the only source of light. He
wished he had a better camera, but this one was lightweight and
easy to tote around. He sighed and shrugged to himself, still
resting against the wall. With enough editing, he would make the
footage work.
     
    Something stirred at the end of the hall. Sam
looked up. A portion of the hallway was illuminated by sunlight
that filtered in through the bars of a narrow window. Everything
else was cloaked in darkness. It was hard to make out anything in
those shadows, especially from where he stood halfway down the long
hall. He focused. His vision was drawn to the darkest patch of
shadows, where the hallway turned down an adjacent corridor.
     
    His heart froze. There in the inky blackness
glowed a thin, pale face. A rush of both terror and sadness washed
over him as he gazed upon her face, full of melancholy, framed by a
mess of unruly blonde hair that looked as if it hadn't seen a brush
in many years. She was half-hidden by the wall. One gleaming,
silver-blue eye peered at him from where she stood at the bend in
the hallway. He ran his eyes down the length of her body, noticing
the rags she wore that resembled a tattered burlap sack. He gasped.
She wasn't touching the floor, but hovering there in the
darkness.
     
    She floated sideways from her hiding place,
coming into full view. Every hair on his body stood erect. “Mark!”
he screamed.
     
    Mark's reply from the other room seemed to
come from miles away. “What?”
     
    “Mark! Come here! Quick!”
     
    The girl drifted toward him in a fluid
motion, her feet still inches from the ground. Her skin was an
eerie shade of pale blue, glowing faintly in the dimness of the
hall. Her face was young and slender, and even though he was
afraid, he recognized a natural beauty there. Yet the sickly blue
color of her down-turned lips caused him to step backwards, away
from the ghastly sight as it approached.
     
    She was only a few yards away as she reached
out to him. “He's here,” she whispered in his mind. She didn't
speak the words aloud. Her lifeless blue lips never moved. Sam
heard her voice like a gust of wind through his skull, a sense of
urgency in the words. He shivered. The girl's unwelcome entry into
his thoughts frightened him more than anything else.
     
    “Who's here?” he stammered. The girl's foggy,
white eyes flicked to the doorway.
     
    Mark appeared in the opening, eyeing Sam with
confusion. “What did you say?”
     
    Sam gulped, eyes wide. “The girl,” he said,
pointing. But she was gone. Whipping around to check the other
direction, he nearly lost his balance.
     
    “Dude, what's wrong? You look like you saw
a—” Mark paused. A shit-eating grin spread over his face. “Don't
tell me you saw a ghost...” He teased his friend with a slight
shake of his head, chuckling softy.
     
    “I'm out of here,” was Sam's only reply. He
turned and headed in the direction from which they'd come.
     
    “But you can't! We're not done!”
     
    “Oh, I'm done!” Sam was fuming. He stormed
down the corridor, camera in hand, determined to wait in the car.
Yes, he would wait there until Mark agreed to call it quits. Why?
Because there was no reasoning with Mark. Sam knew him well enough
to know that if he explained what had happened, if he described
what he saw, mockery and skepticism would be Mark's only reaction.
He didn't have time for that. He trusted his own sanity; he knew
what he'd seen was real, and he wasn't stupid enough to hang around
a haunted asylum for the sake of a college film project.
     
    “Sam! Sam, wait!” Mark's hand was on his
shoulder. He eased around to block his path. “I'm sorry. I didn't
mean to piss you off. You saw something?”
     
    “Not just something. I saw a fucking dead
girl, and she talked to me.” There was silence then, tension so
thick you could taste it in the air. Or maybe that was the dust and
mold spores.
     
    “Look,