At first it was the harsh, ragged whisper of just one voice, male or female I couldn’t tell. They were speaking nonsense, words I didn’t recognize as any language, and yet they sunk into me just the same. The intent still came across.
They were the whispers of psychosis, of pure hopelessness and desperation.
And then they multiplied. One voice became many, all whispering their rough pleas, their nonsensical words getting under my skin, lulling me into their madness until the hundreds of crazed voices were all I could hear.
I pulled away from the door, and the minute I did so, the whispering stopped, leaving me in silence. I counted to ten, gathering the courage to do it again. I carefully put my hand on the knob and my ear back on the door.
There were no whispers.
Just one metallic voice, like it was speaking through a crackly radio.
“She’s behind you,” it whispered in its strained transmission.
My lungs felt like they were shriveling up, my heart seeming to stop. The fear was so strong, so wicked, I thought it might just consume me right there and reduce me to nothing.
She was behind me. I didn’t have to guess who.
I straightened up and turned around to look.
Shawna was across the room staring at me intently, her posture stiff and her head angled down, creating shadows on her sickly white face. Blood dribbled down her chin and a red-stained rag was clutched in one of her small hands.
She didn’t say anything. She just stared at me.
And ever so slowly smiled, displaying a mouth soaked with blood.
I wasn’t about to hear what she had to say.
I pushed out the door lock and was ready to turn the knob when I looked down and saw eight long black fingers coming in underneath the door, wiggling up at me.
I screamed and staggered backward toward the couch.
“Dex!” I screamed. “Rebecca! Someone help!”
“I can scream louder than you can,” Shawna said in her sing-song voice. She took two steps toward me and stopped, her gaze going over to the door, to the wriggling, stick-thin fingers of the bad thing as it tried to get underneath it. It was only a matter of time before it realized the door was unlocked, a matter of time before it was in the room with me.
“Dex!” I screamed again.
“Dex!” she screamed, high-pitched and piercing. Then she laughed, mocking me.
“That’s right,” she said. “Keep screaming. I screamed and I screamed and I screamed when I was locked in that space, locked in that cold box. I wasn’t dead and they wouldn’t believe me.”
I eyed her with trepidation, not wanting to engage her but feeling I had to all the same. “What box?”
“The morgue,” she said, smiling and twirling a strand of her hair around her blood-stained finger. “It wasn’t my time, I wasn’t dead. And they knew it. The nurses knew it. But they had to make room. And my dad wasn’t there anymore. He couldn’t tell them no.”
“The nurses…” I trailed off, finding it hard to speak. My gaze kept going to the fingers under the door, now making long scratches in the floor. “The nurses killed you?”
Her eyes turned black as coal, her irises obliterated. “I was going to die anyway, we all knew that. My father couldn’t save me. He couldn’t save himself either.” She came two steps forward, almost floating along the floor. “I wasn’t the only one. Some of us burned in the incinerator. Some of us were left in the cold to die. My friend Elliot was smothered with a pillow. We were all tossed out to make room.”
“What do you want with me?”
She eyed me curiously. “You’re the only person who really sees me.”
“What about Jody?”
She snarled contemptuously. “She doesn’t have what I need.”
I inhaled icy air into my lungs. “What do you need?”
She grinned. “A way to be alive again. He promised me I could have that if I let him eat.”
I didn’t have to look to the door to know whom she was talking about.
“And he can’t do that without you?” I was afraid of the answer to this one, but I asked it all the same. “He can’t eat?”
With a scraping sound, the bad thing retracted its claws underneath the doorframe. Shawna looked at me in shock. “What did you do?” she hissed at me.
I shook my head, terrified and confused.
Shawna ran over to the door and opened it, poking her head out into the hallway. She gave me one last blood-glazed snarl before she ran out the door and down the hallway. Her already faint footsteps faded into nothing.
Well that was just great. I posed one question and their whole dynamic came crashing down. I had to wonder here who was the pet and who was the owner.
The answer made me shiver.
If he was a demon like Oldman said some believed, and he fed off of hate and fear, he’d have an endless food supply at this hospital, especially if what Shawna said was true. Was there really patient abuse, nurses killing off young ailing TB victims in order to make room for others during the epidemic? It wouldn’t have been the first time it happened, but to imagine sick children with no hope being tossed into a fire or smothered with a pillow, like Elliot was supposedly, it got me deep inside.
I looked around the teachers’ lounge again, paranoid that maybe some other child would be in the room with me, another child like Shawna with a deal with the devil and an obvious vendetta, but everything looked normal again.
I couldn’t stay in here. I didn’t care about my pride or my point. With shaking hands I gathered up my blanket and the camera I’d never turned on, and cautiously made my way to the door.
I poked my head out. The hallway looked empty. I stepped out, looking both ways.
Down by the washroom I saw Rebecca walking toward it. She stopped halfway, looking over her shoulder at me for a moment before she continued and disappeared through the door. I walked back into the nurses’ quarters, wondering if I was being selfish by being upset over her and Dex when here she was pregnant and feeling alone
Dex was lying on his side in bed, his eyes watching me and glinting in the low light. I couldn’t look at him, not now. I wanted to ask if he had heard anything, heard me screaming for help, but I could only assume he didn’t. Dex was loyal and protective to the core. If he heard anything wrong, he would have been there for me.
I ignored his stare and made my way over to my bed.
That’s when I noticed the silhouette of someone in Rebecca’s bed next to me.
Fuck.
Before I could think about it, dwell on it, get scared about it, I poked my head around the curtain and to my surprise saw Rebecca, in the flesh, sitting up in her bed and looking at me with sad, wet eyes.
“Sorry, Perry,” she whispered. When I didn’t respond and could only stare at her dumbfounded, she lay back down in her bed, turning over on her side.
What the damn ass hell was going on? One minute I see Rebecca going to the washroom, the other she’s back in her bed. I stewed on that as I climbed into my bed, dragging the blanket up to my chin. This place really was fucking with me, and now I was in bed between my two friends and partners, both of whom were intimate with each other at one point, both of whom had kept something major out of my life, both of whom I was mad at.
And both of whom were the only people in this place that I could ever trust.
I didn’t sleep a wink for the rest of the night.
I didn’t think any of us did.