13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  What evil lurked in the darkness of the shut-off basement, it thrived with time, but it needed its mother to nourish it to its full health. It needed the midwife to pull it out of its unborn limbo. It had waited all this time, the gestation period was done—a hundred years, no more, no less. The birth of a new evil was waiting to take place, waiting for the wet-nurse.

  Madam Mungo.

  CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR

  Paranormality

  “See? Nothing,” Carrie said and threw her juice-box in the bin across the room. The empty Zulu box flung across in a trajectory, missed the table lamp on Carrie’s desk, and made a neat dunk in the dustbin, joining the heap of crumbled papers and cigarette stubs.

  “But! But! But! I swear! I mean it! It works when I’m alone! I’m not crazy!” the patient, a middle-aged man named Gilbert, uttered in dismay. Gilbert had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, the worst kind. He had daily sessions with Carrie, while her other patients saw her on the weekends, or on alternate days. He was not recovering, despite the heavy dosage of haloperidol and lithium, and the daily therapy sessions that he had with Carrie. He was convinced that he was not crazy, just like he was convinced that he was communicating with beings from the other world through his Ouija board.

  The board lay on Carrie’s table, and Gilbert had been trying to make her see that he was indeed communing with undead spirits. But so far, the only progress which he had made was moving the pointer on the board with his own fingers, and straining his neck sideways and rolling his eyes upward as if to show the realness of it all.

  She was thoroughly unimpressed. Sometimes Carrie thought that Gilbert was not crazy at all, and was just feigning his schizophrenia to get access to the medicine that he was consuming and to continue to live out in the homely private room. But then she’d think about his state. His dishevelled look—the beard which spread across his chest and the moustache covered in snot and goo, the filth on his clothes which he never changed, even though he was offered fresh attire every morning, the redness in his eyes that suggested addiction… or genuine madness. He was not old. Gilbert was thirty-two, and before his admittance to Sacred Heights’ psych ward, he had been a computer programmer for Bethesda softworks. The last game he was working on was called The Evil Within, and from what little Carrie knew about it, it seemed rather dementing and unhealthy, even for a sane person.

  “I know. I believe you. But we’ve been at it for two hours, Gilbert, and my other patients are waiting for me,” she said as patiently as she could, but the quiver on her lips displayed the irritation she was trying to keep bottled up. It helps if the patient you are working on shows some signs of improvement. It helps if they get better with medication. But Gilbert, that psychologist’s anomaly, was getting worse ever day.

  “I can show you I’m not lying…this place is haunted...Wait!” he said and closed his eyes. His hands clamped around his ears and he started humming to himself under his breath.

  “Aha! The juice that you were drinking! Spirits say it was not juice! It was vodka!” Gilbert stood up from his chair and started dancing in a victorious manner.

  This new revelation struck Carrie as horrifying. Sure, he was right, she was not drinking Zulu, but had painstakingly added a half glass of vodka through a small funnel so that no one would suspect… But how did he know this?

  It’s not that implausible. Your breath must be reeking of alcohol, the rationality in her spoke out, and she calmed down a little.

  “Ha-ha! Very funny Gilbert. Nice try. I’ll tell the nurse to sedate you with Valium tonight. You’ve been bad,” she said threateningly and was pleased to see the look of victory in his eyes change to horror.

  “Not Valium! Anything but that! I hate it! You know that! I hate you, Doctor!” Gilbert clasped his hands around his ears again, as if expecting Carrie to spew more vileness, and cursed her loudly.

  “I’m not a doctor, I am your therapist—a psychologist. There’s a difference,” she said, her vexation reaching new heights. If only she could slap him across the face.

  “Really?” he asked, stretching the word out into three long syllables.

  “Yes. Really. But that doesn’t mean I won’t make the nurse administer Valium. You’ve been very agitated lately. You need sleep. How long has it been since you lay[ Every afternoon we lay down and rest. Lay is the verb that means “to recline,” which is to lie. Present tense ‘lie’ becomes ‘lay’ in the past tense.

  “lied” can only be the past tense of telling a falsehood. If someone lied, they fibbed.] down in your bed?” She shifted the blame on him. Two could play at this game, and he was forgetting that he was up against a psychologist—someone who had a very good understanding of the workings of the human mind, what drove it to pleasure or guilt; sometimes that road was a thin and fuzzy one.

  “Last night,” he said, shifting his eyes downwards.

  “You’re lying. I can see your ears turn red. Is that why you’re covering them?”

  Gilbert grew angry and clawed at her face. But she was ready for this. She pushed the security button and called for the guards, but before anyone could come in, she punched Gilbert across the face for being such a huge arse…and under pretence of self-defence.

  The security personnel in their blue garbs with stone-carved faces came inside and grabbed hold of Gilbert from both sides as he screamed, “It was her! She hit me in the noggin, look!” He tried to show them the bruise on his face, but there was none. She had hit him, but not that brutishly. Certainly not hard enough to leave a mark.

  “You’ll see… You’ll see,” Gilbert screamed at her as the personnel dragged him away to his room.

  Does this make me a bad person? Punching a patient in the face? Even if it was in self-defence? Carrie thought. Does it?

  It does, she answered herself. It did not matter if Gilbert was faking his illness, it did not matter if he was vexing her or not, nothing sanctioned her to punch him. She knew that no one would believe him. All this guilt-tripping was making her feel thirsty, and she was fresh out of anything to drink.

  Carrie Reynolds pushed herself up from her seat and took dragging, lethargic steps towards the door of her clinic. The water dispenser was at the end of the corridor, but it was not water she was craving. This unhealthy addiction to alcohol had started last year after she graduated from the University of Greenwich’s clinical psychology master’s program. College, for the second time in her life, was over and she was greeted by the same joblessness that she had faced when she had earned her undergrad degree. For the first time in her life she had the entire day to her unemployed self, and she did what any other person in her situation would do: she fell into the recesses of passivity, binging tv shows, drinking booze, staying in a state of dishevelment for days. All other things eventually dispersed—she got a job earlier this year, as in-house psychologist at Sacred Heights Hospital in Crouch End; she became too busy to watch TV shows or movies, she learnt how to keep herself prim and tidy. But she could not shake off her drinking problem. It stayed with her all this time, and for the first few months at her new job she found it quite impossible to cope without her vodka, her whiskey; but later, a colleague at the hospital told her that she could drink as much as she wanted if she could hide it.

  And so, she did. She hid her alcohol in packs of juice and in thermos flasks. So far, she had not been caught. She drank cautiously, stealthily. Until today. Gilbert had looked past her deceptiveness. How? They were sitting apart with the entire length of the table between them. There was no chance that he could have smelt the alcohol on her breath. She did not drink that much. Just occasional sips every thirty minutes. Enough to make her head light, but not enough to make her dizzy or clumsy.

  “Argh!” she cried and kicked the wall as she walked out towards the dispenser. Maybe a cool drink of water was not the worst idea in the world.

  “He’s right, you know,” someone spoke in her ear, making her jump in shock. She turned around and saw no man, although the voi
ce definitely emanated from one.

  “Huh?”

  “He’s right. This place is haunted.”

  “The first sign of craziness is having a conversation with yourself. A vocal conversation,” she replied, closed the door behind her and walked to the edge of the corridor to the water dispenser. On her way, she met nurse Clarice and greeted her with a fake smile and a high-pitched voice. Nurse Clarice returned her greeting. Overhead, the bulbs flickered and dimmed indefinitely, and both looked upwards, unsurprised.

  This was a common occurrence in the hospital. Anyone here for long enough knew that. In the distance, Gilbert screamed as one of the nurses administered his Valium injection.

  ***

  “Finally!” Carrie sighed upon reaching her apartment, which was four blocks away from the hospital; she’d acquired it on a good deal. It was not in the nicest of neighbourhoods, and the downwind draft from the sewage treatment plant carried a strong stench through the windows on weekends, but those were about the only negative aspects about this place. The apartment had two expansive rooms, a kitchen, a living room and two bathrooms. She shared it with no one—no roomie, no boyfriend, no pet. She loved living like this. The last romantic affair she had, ended when she discovered that her boyfriend of six months, a post-doc student at the university, was bisexual and secretly banging his ‘best friend.’

  Carrie hung her keys by the door, took off her overcoat and threw it on the sofa, groaned in relief as she took off her shoes, pants, shirt, and walked to the fridge to fetch a cold one.

  She reclined into her Barcalounger and opened her beer can while mindlessly changing channels on the telly. There wasn’t anything special, just the usual; someone bombed a third-world city in middle-east; the American president was throwing one of his baby fits again; a hate-group committed blatant crimes against the LGBTQ people in Chiswick; a cat talent show was livestreaming out of West London—a furry Persian in definite lead. It had that smug look on its face which screamed a holier than thou attitude—characteristic of pedigree cats treated like Egyptian goddesses by their owners.

  Her mind, though, kept going back to how rudely she had treated Gilbert, and the hurtful look in his eyes as the personnel dragged him away. She started feeling guilt seep down her throat along with the beer, and it was not a good feeling. Feeling suffocated and remorseful, Carrie got up from her Barcalounger, shut off the television, packed away the clothes which she had thrown on the floor just a few minutes ago, and threw her beer-can in the bin.

  “Why do I do this?” she asked herself as she grabbed the keys from the hanger and walked out her apartment, heading to the hospital, drawn by guilt and shame. She intended to apologize to Gilbert.

  It had started raining again, for the second time in this week. What was up with London? This side of it was almost never shown in the hundreds of tourism documentaries or in any of the travel books that dubbed it the best city in England. It rained a lot, and whenever that happened, the gutter stench from the depths of the sewers would reek everywhere. The regular Londoners would not be put off by it; they’ve become used to this odour and now associate it with twisted nostalgia, but for those who were new to the city, like Carrie,[ We use reflexive pronouns when the subject and the object of the verb refer to the same person or thing: She made herself a cup of tea] this smell was unbearable. More unbearable was the weather following the rain. If a kindly gust of wind did not blow right after a drizzle, the whole city became draped in the worst heat that you can imagine. But more often than not, the gust did blow. Small silver linings.

  She stood under an awning outside her apartment building, contemplating whether to go back for her raincoat, decided it would be better not to, and went to her car, shielding her face with one hand while unlocking the car door with the other, she pulled it open.

  As she sat in her Datsun, the dampness of her clothes ruined the new leather seats, and she cursed herself for this. She twisted the key in the ignition, turned the windscreen[ Windscreen is UK English for the US Windshield] wipers on full, and drove carefully down the slippery road.

  At the first intersection, she took a right and kept driving. For some big-city reason which she was not going to spend time thinking about, the streets were jammed with traffic and pedestrians alike, neither of which seemed to be bothered by the rain at all.

  She drove along, counting the blocks. One. Two. Three. Four. At the end of the fourth was the hospital, on Elder Avenue. She parked her car in the parking lot across from the hospital. It was a multifloored space. The first three floors offered no vacant spots, so she begrudgingly drove her car up the slope leading to the top floor—in the sleet. This place was currently abandoned except for her own car. She climbed out the cart with her overcoat thrown over her head, and locked it in a hurry.

  Her urgency left her when she saw the hospital from this height. She had never been to the fourth floor of the lot. Normally she’d park her car at the very least on the first floor. The hospital was an entire story shorter than the parking allotment building. She gazed at it from above, with the rain drenching her a little mesmerized by the Victorian gothic structure of the building standing out amongst its surrounding structures. It was an old building, alright, and its visage gave off a look of despicableness, especially in this downpour. Four conic minarets rose on each side of the hospital, so it resembled the castle of some old Count. Count Dracula to be precise. And very opportunely, a sliver of lightning cracked the sky open against the backdrop of the hospital, making it look all the more spooky.

  Carrie decided she had seen enough of all this.

  She went to the elevator and punched the key. It came clambering up its dark chute and opened its door to Carrie. She stepped inside and punched again at the ground floor button. The rustic elevator rumbled and clanked downwards, making her grab the handlebar at the side. Please don’t let this be the way I die, she thought humourlessly.

  She got out of the elevator and made a straight run for the hospital on the other side—the traffic light had turned red, thankfully, in her favour—and when she reached the giant doors of the building, she pushed against them to let herself in.

  The interior was dull, dimly lit, and claustrophobic, though the hospital looked expansive and well-lit from the outside. The nurse behind the reception desk grinned at her and showed three missing teeth.

  “Ma’am? What are you doing here this late in the night?” she asked with her crooked, toothless grin.

  Late in the night? What are you talking about? It’s nine, at the very most! Thought Carrie. Before she could answer nurse Abigail—the toothless woman behind the reception desk—she looked at her iPhone to check the time. There were fifteen messages waiting for her on her WhatsApp and her Facebook Messenger, and ten emails on her Gmail. The time, surprisingly was eleven fifty.

  Jesus Christ, how long did I sit in front of that telly for? She thought, and then noticed that the nurse was ogling at Carrie’s dumbfounded face.

  “I… I was here to check on a patient,” she replied.

  “Which one, ma’am? You’ve got so many,” Abigail said, her voice breaking into a cockney accent.

  “Gilbert. Gilbert Gilfoyle.”

  “Funny name innit? Funnier chap,” Abigail said as Carrie walked by her to the private wardrooms.

  That hospital smell of medicine, camphor and anaesthetics was wafting strongly from every room as she walked to the leftmost corridor on the first floor.

  Why doesn’t anyone do something about the lighting? Carrie screamed in her inner monologue. This lack of lighting was not an issue for her on most days because her shift was from eight in the morning to six in the evening, and in the day this place seemed very well lit—at least from her office. This was her first time here at night, and everything about this place was spooking her. The floors on which she walked everyday seemed creakier, the overhead lamps flickered and closed down, only to light up again ever so dimly, shadows lurked around the corners of every room and
corridor bifurcation, scaring her out of her wits, but when she strained her eyes she’d see that they were not monsters but people draped in darkness … Darkness from the lack of proper lighting. As she walked, the corridor seemed to close in on her from every side. She rushed to her office, demented by this paranoia, and shuffled for her keys in her pocket.

  When at last she got the keys, she opened her door and shut it behind her, hoping to find some solitary solace in her office. But there seemed to be none of that here. Rain pattered on the giant windowpane of her room, blurring the lamppost’s light coming from outside. The fluorescent tube on the wall was casting light, all right, but it was somehow even duller than the rest.

  She sat down behind her desk and used the hospital telephone line to call for the nurse on this night shift. It was nurse Rachel, a very harsh and sharp woman whom the patients feared, and called names behind her back. She marched into the room in a Germanic manner, looking as sullen as she always did, and said, “You called ma’am?”

  “Yes. Have Gilbert from room 120 sent to my office,” Carrie said.

  “Him? He’s been sedated. He’s asleep,” Rachel replied.

  “Can you please go see him and check if he is awake? If he is, please escort him here,” Carrie pleaded.

  “I will see to it,” Rachel said and went away.

  Carrie waited behind her desk, tapping at the wood impatiently, humming in an unnerved manner, thinking over what she would say to Gilbert. How was she going to apologize to him?

  The Ouija board, property of Gilbert, lay on the table. He’d forgotten it. She pulled it towards herself and took the planchette in her hand, staring at the board and the many letters and numbers on it, wondering why would anyone fall for this shit. This was as bogus as a crystal ball, or that table around which people sat, held hands, and prayed to the dead spirits for otherworldly council.