13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  On Sunday, one painter accompanied by a carpenter, arrived to nail a huge sign on the top of the three-storied building. It said “Madam Mungo’s Sanitorium for the Sickly and Stricken.” It was a mouthful, but that was the point. People were oddly attracted to the billboard with those words painted in red; people who would have otherwise ignored the hospital as they passed it by.

  In the second week, once all the preparations were done, the sanitorium opened its gates to public. The maroon mahogany doors, etched calligraphically with symmetric symbols and mystical designs, while to the public looked captivating and welcoming, were sigils meant to ward off light and all that was good. Were a saint or a Hunter to step inside, he would burn from the inside to his death. To any observer, it would appear to be a textbook case of a heart attack, and it would not be out of place either; after all, where else do you expect people to succumb to bodily diseases if not at a hospital?

  But the Hunters, the saints, and priests, they were acquainted well with those wards, and stayed away, stayed wary of the resident evil within, death’s elder sister, Madam Mungo.

  A certain detective, living in his bachelor apartment with a doctor friend on a street with a culinary name, was asked of his services by the clergy of the city. They implored him, offered him coin, to go inside that sanitorium on their behalf, gather notes on the vile activities (for they were sure that something wicked was brewing behind those walls) and help them in unmasking Madam Mungo’s treachery to the oblivious public, and thus close that establishment for good.

  “You must think that a person like me wouldn’t believe in the supernatural, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: When you remove the impossible, that what remains, however improbable, must be the truth. And in this case, from the information that you have so biasedly provided, I can only say that there are beings such as Mungo. Beings which cannot be classified as human. I would suggest that you cease your quarrel with them, let them be, as you would other predators should you yourself be residing alongside them in a forest. A lion respects a wolf, and the two live in somewhat harmony, until the time comes that it is inevitable for the pride to fight the pack. Surely, that time is not upon you, or is it?” the detective put to the head of the clergy, and sent him away, disappointed.

  The hospital—back in those days, hospitals and sanitoriums were considered one and the same—started gaining traction. In its first month of operation, twenty-five patients, all suffering from consumption, were escorted into the wards by relatives, kin, and friends who were too vexed to take care of them any further, and were trepid of the disease’s contagiousness.

  “You shan’t have to worry, good sirs and madams,” Mungo would say to the relatives, the kin, and the friends, reassuring them that they were making the right decision. Such was the indifference of those people that many of them said, “I don’t need to keep coming back, yeah? If they die, have the matter settled with the morgue or the funeral parlour. Here’s some extra pounds for your troubles,” while others said nothing whatsoever, only leaving a noticeable sum on Mungo’s table. She’d nod understandingly and bid them goodbye.

  Their apathy ensured they’d never come back to check on their diseased relatives again. And Mungo was counting on that apathy. The dying patients who lay in the wards would serve as meals for her and her nurses, their blood would be used in rituals in the basement, and their bones in marrow soup for the beasts: the hellhounds caged in the attic.

  The operation ran flawlessly. And why should it not? She had been doing this, along with her obliging patrons—the nurses—, for an eternity now.

  The thirty-something beds in the main ward were occupied by blood coughing patients; their textures pale, their bodies nearly lifeless. They moaned, they cried, they rang the bells on their bedsides, hoping for nurses to come and alleviate their pain. But no nurse would come in the light of day. Nay. To do that would be exposing themselves to its divine light. And sunlight killed more of their ilk than any Hunter or clergyman.

  For this purpose, Mungo had hired bellboys; eager kids wanting to earn a few pennies per day, to see to the patients. They would administer injections with their naïve hands, wipe the blood off the patients with unhygienic cloths, clean their faeces, change their catheters, and with those same dirty hands (for when have children ever given a damn about cleanliness?) they’d feed thin gruel, brackish water, and stale bread to the patients. They would laugh and chirp about as patients lay moaning and craving proper medical attention.

  The nurses and the Madam, they’d rest easy in their cellar chambers, sleeping but not quite, keeping an ear out for the children’s merriment, the patients’ agony, and the door. Ever so infrequently, someone would come barging in with a patient in their arms, eager to get rid of him.

  But Madam Mungo had taken everything into account. Of course, she and her nurses could not go out in the day, so they had hired women; pleasant looking women who donned nurse uniforms; well-mannered women who smiled and bowed and took the sick patients in their arms. These women were clueless, just like the kids, as to what this place really was. They wanted to make minimum wage, get off the streets, and live a little better than the rest of the poverty-stricken people of Crouch End. At the turn of the day, at the setting of the sun, they, along the children, would take their leave and the nurses and Madam Mungo would rise from their basement sanctums, ready to see to the patients, to siphon their blood, to devour the near dead, and to heal those who showed signs of betterment. People don’t come to a hospital where the death rate is abominably high. Mungo had to show results. And she did. For every five patients who[ ‘Who’ is used in place of ‘that’ when referring to a person. While ‘that’ may refer to people, animals, groups, or things, ‘who’ is preferred when referring to people] died mysteriously, there were three who recovered miraculously. These recoverees would go and spread the word about the sanitorium’s wondrous healing, and so the cycle would continue.

  Until it ended in 1918.

  ***

  Madam Mungo, in her sarcophagus-like bed, lay in wait for the day to be over. The noises reaching her from above were enticing; the pained patients begging for relief… Oh, I will give them relief, she thought. It was the quiet ones she took a liking to. They would just whimper in silence and ring the bell only a couple of times a day. But the rest, the ones who she ate, were loud and rude. It was as if they thought they were privileged to be in this sanatorium; that their consumption was an advantage to be benefitted from; that they were perhaps on vacation and deserved warm food, soft beds, and medicine every hour. They should have gone to the other hospitals in the city. But they can’t now, can they? Mungo brooded. All the hospitals in the city were overrun, overcrowded, understaffed, and generally in a deplorable state.

  A different voice, of a young man screaming, caught her attention. He was coughing, yelling, vomiting, and pleading for the women above to take him in their care.

  “Now, now, good sir. We will. Just give us the money, sign this form here, and we’ll get you sorted out really quick,” one of the women said. Mungo heard a jingle of coins, a scratching of a fountain pen, and then the dragging of footsteps to the ward.

  “I need medicine. My lungs…they burn!” the young man said.

  “No smoking inside!” a boy yelled at him.

  “Bugger off, will ya? Everyone’s dying. No one gives a fuck!”

  Mungo became angry at this outburst of rudeness from the man. She heard a window being slid open, and the cries of indignation of other patients at the man for tainting the ward with smoke.

  Mungo slept. She had made up her mind. This man will be the first she’ll devour tonight.

  ***

  The sun, that orange clown’s pom-pom, descended behind the cityscape, and darkness prevailed. Mungo rose, and with her, her nurses. The women and children in charge had left a good ten minutes before. There were only the patients, the prey, and them, the predators.

  Mungo slid across the stai
rs, her feet not touching the ground, and levitated to the ground floor. Ah, darkness, you sweet recess, she thought and began lighting the lanterns in the main hall. The nurses skittled here and there, candles in hand, lighting the remaining lanterns.

  Placing her lantern on the stand, Mungo walked quietly to the ward and took a good look around, counting heads. Ten patients. They would number only nine after tonight. She was not worried about their lack of numbers. It was a dry spell, all right, but it will pass. Pestilence, that horseman of apocalypse, always provides more sickness. For that, Mungo, herself an entity as deadly as the horsemen, was grateful to them. There was once a time when dead bodies, in the wake of war and famine and in the wake of disease, would lie on the streets like dead leaves in the throes of fall, and she, Mungo, would have her way with them. She used to be a goddess back in those days. And then civilization, society, order emerged, forcing her to scuttle into the shadows, wary of the humans and their laws that allowed for witches to be burned at the stake. She was no witch. She was no vampire. But they weren’t going to see that, were they?

  Mungo had crept up to the new patient, the young man, and she stood shining her lantern on his face.

  “Doctor?”

  “I am. Doctor, nurse, and matron. Tell me child, what ails you?”

  “Child? You’re probably younger than I am!”

  “What ails you? Other than a tampered sense of humour?”

  “Tuberculosis! What else? Is this not a sanitorium?”

  “It is,” she said and put her hand on his face, checking for periphery fever that would often arise as a result of consumption. But he did not have any. She checked his eyes for redness and rawness, but they were fresh. She opened his mouth by dragging his freshly shaven jaw downwards, but there were no signs of sickness in his throat.

  “You feign!” Madam Mungo screamed and backed a step, aghast at this treachery.

  “As do you, Madam!” the man rose out of his bed and stood in front of her in a stance of battle.

  “Name yourself!” she said, turning into the vicious nightmare that she was underneath the white gown and the illusionary skin.

  “Hunter Sullivan, you vile creature from the underworld!” the man said and brandished his fists at her, like a Kung-Fu fighter.

  “Sullivan!” an unearthly shriek escaped the Madam’s mouth, despite it being not precisely a mouth now. She had turned dark black in colour; her dress had ripped from her and now lay in tatters on the floor. She stood naked, twelve feet tall, six arms flailing in menace, and a tentacular body, like an octopus with many appendages, she, it slithered towards Sullivan.

  The patients, upon witnessing this horror, began screaming and moving out of their beds. But the nurses, who had heard the commotion and sensed the danger in the air, came running, rallying around Mungo, the necrophage goddess.

  Slit and slash, they killed the prisoners and suckled on their necks momentarily, to gather strength and to waste not the blood flowing unhindered. When the nine patients were dead, the nurses and Mungo stood around Sullivan, ready to kill him. But they would question him first. How did a holy man enter their walls?

  The nurses started twisting, turning, transfiguring into dreadful creatures that little resembled their previous human states. Claws and tentacles, talons and pincers, eyes red and skin black, they all morphed until the lot of them were demons; their true form.

  “Your mistake, Hunter. Your death. You see you are outnumbered, and you have walked into the cave of the lion, ye little lamb,” Mungo uttered in her demonic drawl.

  “You’re mistaking me for the wrong animal there, Mungo,” Sullivan said and brandished from nowhere a metal cane. He slammed the cane on the ground and it became a whip fitted with sharp metal spikes.

  “How did you get in here? Holy men are not allowed!” Mungo, taken aback with this weapon, asked. But then she reminded herself that she was no petty sewer rat or garbage skunk to cower from a measly Hunter and his weapon, and her boldness returned.

  “I am no holy man. I am a sinner; no one is free of sin! This realization, and a couple of shots of whiskey, granted me entry into your sanctum sanitorium,” mocked Sullivan.

  “Behead him! Feast on him!” Mungo shrieked. The nurses, all around him, pounced with their fangs, their talons, and claws, outstretched. Sullivan knew this was going to happen. With a swift jump that plummeted him towards the roof, he rose and swept his whip in a circular motion. Simultaneously, he thought, ignus mortimus sceptrum desilvia!

  The whip burst into flames, like a balrog’s tail, and swashed all around, singing and searing the nurses, sending them staggering back.

  “Black magic!” Mungo yelled.

  “Nay, ye hag! Not everyone is dark as you are! This is divine intervention, the holy flames of St. Jude, the first Hunter, the salvation of the damned!” said the Hunter and came down from his jump, bringing the whip slashing downwards towards Mungo.

  She caught it in her hands, and the dark aura oozing from her hands killed the flames on the whip. With her brute strength, she pulled the whip away from Sullivan, and threw it out of the ward. She cackled at this disarmament, and the nurses joined in too. They closed in around Sullivan, but the man stayed his ground.

  “I am not a hunter if I am at the mercy of my weapons. I, myself, am God’s armament. My hands are his swords, my mouth his ballista, and my legs are siege towers, and my chest a wall of defence. Elohim lafanza, heidem macanza!”

  With those last incantations, the hunter fell prostrate. The nurses closed around him, and Mungo made to swoop at him, but before anyone could so much as touch him or come near him, the Hunter started glowing like a feral fireball, white instead of fiery orange. His glow filled the entire room and blinded the nightmares, the nurses, and the Madam. They felt their skins burn and melt from their bodies. They screamed as the divine light seethed through them and poured agony into every pore of their being. They cried, they begged him to stop, but the Hunter knew that, in order to see this pandemic to an end, he had to sacrifice his own life, and with that grave knowledge in his mind, he closed his eyes in peace, knowing that he was going to die for a cause bigger than his own self, and said, “lehilful khatam!”

  The glow draped the entire sanitorium in its embrace and an implosion occurred in the ward. Nothing remained in that room with the empty beds and stained bedsheets. Only splattered blood on the floor and a fallen lantern feeding flames to one of the loose wooden rafters.

  Oh, you’ve killed us in our flesh, Hunter swine, but what of the menace we left in our wake? The unholy unborn in the basement, and the vials of devil blood, and the devourer of death? You killed the caretakers, but what of the real threat itself? Mungo mocked Sullivan in her astral form. The nurses, not being able to withstand the implosion, had perished. Only she and the Hunter remained, trapped in their spirits, neither dead nor living, floating in the void of half-arsed afterlife.

  Oh, the fight for the good, even if it is being fought by undeserving sinners like me, is never lost. There will be someone… Someone who’ll come and see this quest to an end. I have faith, the Hunter said, smiling. He could see that his response had incited rage in Mungo.

  Faith is what caused the downfall of man. There is no higher power, no being controlling the fates of the many. There is only death, and those who devour the dead. There is only the devil, our high priest, our husband, she said.

  God is not affected by the slander that your slur, you, Demon Trollip. I have my faith, you have yours. We shall see, at the turn of the tide, at the time when it comes, who prevails…

  ***

  The sanitorium burned down, all three stories of it, and came tumbling down in flames with the burden of the wood. The coppers were called, the firemen arrived, and when the fire was controlled and the wreckage removed, people called the name of God upon observing the dead patients, mauled and burnt.

  No one saw the Madam, the nurses, or the Hunter. The place was taped off to the public indefinitely,
until it opened five years later as another hospital. But the basement, that sleeping hole for the Madam and the nurses, was never discovered. It still lies under the hospital constructed over it, forgotten but potent, the evil within it brewing like stew, waiting for its time to come, waiting to be reborn again so that it can feed.

  Though this new hospital was bigger in comparison to the older sanitorium, and brighter with electricity, the people inside it—the doctors and the patients—could not help but feel it to be constrictive and dim. Whispers would sound in the corridors in the dark of the night. Whispers of a vengeful woman. And sometimes, but only very infrequently, someone would hear a man’s voice; a man in prayer and incantation.

  And sometimes, horrifying shrieks would resound in the wards, and without offering plausible reason, a woman, a nurse, a patient, a doctor, or even a visitor, would break into tears. Only to be calmed by heavy sedation.

  Several people have gone mad in the hospital. Many people have committed suicide. Even though the name of the place has been changed to Sacred Heights Hospital, it feels anything but sacred.

  Residents of Crouch End, old-timers who have heard the tales from their forefathers and their grandmothers, avoid that hospital, and yet it always is crowded. Even today, in 2017, it’s well patronised, and just so there’s no doubt left after the telling of this tale, it’s very much haunted.

  Upon every death that occurs, untimely or natural, there occurs a tremor in the foundations of the Sacred Heights Hospital, and no one can guess the reason, so they just shrug it off as ‘just another earthquake.’ They know that it is not an earthquake, and they know that there’s something dementedly wrong with the place, but people have a way of forgetting and feigning blindness in the face of something larger than their perception.