13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  “You!” Mungo screamed, but not from her mouth—it was a mental dialogue. She was referring to Carrie. “You stay away from here, or by the devil, my lover and my brother, I will curse you to a childless life if you touch mine!”

  There comes a time when horror reaches its peak and the human mind is unable to comprehend any more fear, and instead draws comprehension in comedy. It’s why clowns are scary and hilarious at the same time. Having tipped over the apex of conceivable fear, Carrie replied, “Fuck you, you, otherworldly bitch!”

  Surprised at this response, Mungo froze, thinking of a retort, and this was window enough for Sullivan to gain footage and catch her off guard. He took his whip out and slashed it around her, capturing her as a cowboy does a wild stallion. She screamed and went staggering, crashing into walls and unseen barriers of the ghastly ether in which the two of them were trapped.

  “Run!” Gilbert spoke in her ear, and grabbed her wrist while making for the door. They pushed it open, stepped out and slammed it behind them.

  The exterior of the corridor seemed rather normal in comparison. No one seemed to have heard the sounds or felt the tremors. If they had, they were doing a helluva job of ignoring it.

  “Come, I think I know how to sneak you out,” Carrie said, and led him to the left wing of the corridor. Ahead was the morgue. They walked inconspicuously, as best they could, and when they were both in the morgue, Carrie wasted no time in rushing to the other side of the cadaverine smelling chamber, where a door to the back of the hospital led outside. It was from here that the dead bodies were taken out of the chamber into hearses.

  “Be quiet,” she said to Gilbert as she snooped around the doctor’s office. Dr Mathew was there, but he was snoring. She ushered Gilbert to follow her, and together the two crept down the chamber and towards the door.

  She creaked the door open, keeping an eye on the sleeping doctor at the same time, and led Gilbert out. Then she followed him and shut the door behind her.

  “Nurse Rachel will discover your absence right away,” Carrie said.

  “Ah, fuhgeddaboudit. She’s the least of our worries tonight,” Gilbert replied. But he was going to be proven wrong.

  “You make your way to the front, I’ll get my car and…I actually don’t know what we are going to do after that. What are we gonna do?” she asked him.

  “Tabernacle Church on Illiniwek Street.”

  “I have never heard either of those two names before in my life.”

  “Get the car, I’ll explain later.”

  ***

  Nurse Rachel stared around the empty room, dark and desolate, looking for signs of Carrie and Gilbert. They were not there. The only signs of their presence were the splotches of sick on the floor, and the pressed curves on the mattress where they had sat.

  “I do not like this,” she said, matter-of-factly. She closed the door behind her and with the flashlight in her hand—nurses and other hospital staff are supposed to have a torch and a rung of general keys—she swept the entire room, searching for something that she did not know was even there.

  Rafters.

  Loose floorboards under the bed, revealed by the piercing beam of her light, were visible under the shabby blanket hiding them.

  “Was bedeutet das?” she said, in her native language, carefully peeking under the bed, with one hand pulling at the boards. They came undone, in her hands. She put her flashlight on the floor and pulled at more of the loose rafters, angered by this discovery yet curious as to where the hole beneath it led.

  “I have to warn the authorities,” she said aloud.

  “Wouldn’t want that, dearie,” a crooning voice, melodic and maternal, spoke in her head.

  “Wer ist das?” she asked.

  “A friend, my dear. Your patient and that sly minx have done a runner,” the voice spoke. Rachel did not know of it, but this was Madam Mungo speaking to her. She had defeated Sullivan yet again, once in an endless cycle of battles between them. He used to win before, but his strength was waning—goodness doesn’t thrive well where dreadful ghosts are meant to dwell. While he was unconscious, she was roaming restlessly in the hospital, looking for a vessel to take hold of.

  “They have broken the rules, yes?” Mungo whispered in Rachel’s ears.

  “Yes.”

  “You would like to exact justice on them? See to it that they’re punished for breaking the law?”

  “…Yes”

  “Would you like me to help you?” this was the crucial step. If this gullible nurse, obsessed with discipline, would say yes, then Mungo would be able to possess her, and finish that what she had started so long ago. Demons, especially ghosts of demons, need permission to enter a vessel. And more often than not, the vessels, humans, are wise enough to say no. But not Rachel.

  “Yes.”

  Thick black strands of dark smoke started convoluting in the air. This black smog started pouring down Rachel’s open, screaming mouth until it filled her entirety, making her eyes black.

  “Ah. Reckoning, the time has come,” Mungo, now possessing full control of Rachel’s body, spoke and crawled down the hole under the bed.

  When Gilbert had made this hole, in secrecy and covertness, he did not foresee that it would be used by the very same dread which he wanted to keep away from it. Neither did Sullivan think that Mungo could outsmart him in battle and knock him out. But she did. And she possessed poor Rachel, and took her down to the hidden basement, the place where the unborn lay waiting. It had remained dormant for long enough.

  Tonight was as good a night as any to bring it to life. A pale-blood full moon was out, overseeing the rainstorm with a sadistic pleasure above the clouds. And necro-craft, lichmancy for those who are acquainted with the ancient language, thrives best under a full moon.

  The torn ramparts, of their own accord, fell back into place, covering the hole, hiding it from unwanted sight.

  ***

  Illiniwek street was the old name for Crescent Road, and the Tabernacle Church was nothing but a shambled tottering building taped off with a foreclosure sign. No signs of life, either on the street or inside the building, were visible, and why would they in this rain? After the downpour had taken the shape of a relentless storm, even the most resilient walkers had taken shelter in tea shops and book nooks, waiting for the rain to die down. They could go home, but London doesn’t sleep until five in the morning. And it was only one ‘o clock now.

  Carrie parked her car in front of the decrepit structure and unlocked the passenger door.

  “You wait here, I’ll be out in a jiff,” Gilbert said and got out of the car, into the rain and ran towards the church.

  She stared at him as he went in through the side-gate. He seemed to be descending into a basement of some sort. She wondered what was so important that he had to get.

  Recapping the entire events of the day, Carrie thought that this was perhaps the most eventful day of her life, more eventful than that scandalous moment when she had come upon her boyfriend tongue-deep in another man’s throat, or when she had discovered that her mother and father were getting divorced and she had spent the rest of the day trying to cut her own wrists. She had wanted to live, and so she stopped at a few light scratches that bled rather deeply, until she was worried that she was going to pass out and die. She had run back to her fighting parents and shown them the sordid state of her arms. They had rushed her to a hospital. She was thirteen then. She was twenty-eight now. Fifteen years after, and she could still feel the sting of the razor she had used on her arms. The doctor had told her that if she had been any more forceful in her infliction, she would have cut open her arteries (or was it veins?)

  “You all right, yeah?” Gilbert asked. He was already sitting beside her. When had he come back? She wondered and observed the giant duffle-bag he was putting on the backseat.

  Just caught up in the whirlwinds of my mind, nothing big, she thought and nodded to him.

  They drove back the way they
had come, but as they did, an earthshattering shake shuddered their car, sending it screeching and twisting along the slippery road.

  “Holy… would you look at that?” Gilbert pointed at the skyward minarets of the hospital in the distance.

  A red beam was emanating from Sacred Heights Hospital and it was tearing the clouds apart, making way through the misty layers of the sky, past the shining moon overhead and into the cosmos, the unlimited darkness.

  “Oh, my Lord, what is that?” Carrie whimpered as she beheld that devilish glow.

  “That is the sign of our being too late…” Gilbert said and slammed his fists on the dashboard of the car in utter defeat. Regardless, Carrie kept driving to the hospital, hoping that it was not too late.

  CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

  Reborn

  “Oh, lovely child, long has it been, fret not, fear not. Mummy is here. Mungo is here,” Rachel spoke in a drawl that did not belong to her. All her life she had slouched while walking, afraid of the retorts people had been throwing at her for being too tall. She was six feet one. But as she walked, possessed, she was upright and marching in the reddish glow of the basement. There were no rooms in there, only one large hall; whatever walls there must have been were now completely eaten by termites—and yet the basement held its (under) ground, not collapsing, not sinking.

  The old that is strong does not wither.

  Mungo, in charge of this clumsy, tall body, drove it from one end of the room to the other, towards the bulbous cluster of pulsating foetal amniotic sacs. They looked like pomegranates from giant country, with their cores glowing crimson. Even though they looked like distinct sacs, they were not discreet—they were all part of one humungous bulging mass of living, breathing gel. At the centre of the gel pod, visible through the thin membrane, was a horned, tailed, and clawed foetus. It was as big as a small elephant, and in that amniotic womb of vile, red mush, it rotated circularly. Its skin was black, its eyes red.

  “How wonderfully you’ve grown, my son, Belshism, you resemble your father! But you have my eyes! Oh, the R’lyehians will be proud,” a tear escaped Mungo’s eyes, and she cradled that cluster of sacs in her embrace.

  “Mama! Mama!” a hungry, livid cry came from inside, and Mungo’s maternal instincts came into play.

  “Child! Your birth is at hand. I am your mother, your sister, your aunt, your wet-nurse, and I promise to bring you into this world with care, and love you for each relation that we share!” she said.

  Rachel’s body began convoluting, bulging, and morphing. She began to grow scythe-like appendages in place of her hands, tentacles in lieu of her legs, pincers where her mouth was, and began shedding her skin. From beneath, Mungo was reborn, and her time was nigh. She was going to bring her spawn into this world.

  Slash! She sliced at the fluid-filled sacs, carefully avoiding the limbs of the monster within. She sliced and hacked until all the ooze had escaped the sacs. The empty pouches hung dryly like an old woman’s eyebags, but the details of the body within them were outlined sharply. Mungo tore at the empty sacs, throwing them away frantically, eager to see the new-born child.

  A claw erupted from the layered mess and ripped through Mungo’s torso, coming out the other side with her heart in its fingers. Mungo cried with pain, and with pleasure, knowing that this was vital, this was necessary, this was what she had been preparing for all those years. Her death was inevitable. That’s how this cycle continues forever.

  “Eat it, my child,” she spoke with her last words.

  “Mama,” the giant demon-spawn said happily and with one huge bite, it gulped down its own mother’s heart. It cradled her dead body lovingly in its long arms, crying at her loss, laughing at its birth.

  Dark crimson light shone from its entire body and shot through towards the skies, quaking everything like it was the end of times, communing with the cosmic entities, telling them that it had birthed, its time had come.

  Like all new-borns, it was hungry, it needed to feed, and that one heart which it consumed for continuing the chain of life was not enough. It needed more. It needed not merely survival, but proper thriving. And so, unable to bear the hunger, it ripped Mungo’s limbs apart, shearing them like weeds from a flowerbed.

  It fed. Remorsefully, guiltily, yet enjoyably, it fed on the carcass of its own mother, gaining strength with every bite, with every droplet of coagulating blood that it suckled, it became powerful. A giant span of wings tore its way out of the monster’s back, and it flapped them, feeling the gust of wing levitate it a few feet above the ground.

  ***

  “Sir! Ma’am! You cannot go in there! It’s an emergency, the hospital has been evacuated!” a policeman put his hand in front of Carrie and Gilbert as they tried to get in through the front door. Elder Avenue was barred from both sides to allow the hospital patients, doctors, and nurses to cross the street. Stretchers and hospital beds were being dragged from the gates of the building to the parking lot. The whole street, drenched in rain, was crowded. People clung to people, some crying, some whimpering, pointing at the red glow in the sky, pointing at the hospital, mumbling, muttering.

  “Bollocks!” Gilbert yelled. The policemen and fire brigade had taped the area off with caution tape and barriers. Gilbert’s giant duffle bag hung from his shoulders. He slunk under its weight.

  “Come with me,” Carrie grabbed him by his coat’s cuff. He followed her and together, they ran down the road, heading for the back alley that led to the rear of the hospital, to the morgue entrance.

  The police were yet to bar this area off, and as of right now, no one occupied it. Carrie pushed the morgue door open and let herself in. Gilbert followed her.

  The metal cabinets containing the dead bodies clambered and shook. The black plastic body bags jolted and convoluted; the dead within coming to life.

  “Don’t pay heed to this. It’s just the effect of the evil underground! They’re not actually coming to life. Or, if they are, God help us,” Gilbert said. The two were running down the empty, quaking corridors of the hospital, having difficulty finding their footing in the darkness, in the vileness.

  They turned in the corridor towards the ward room 120. It seemed to be jammed. After much kicking and pushing, Gilbert muttered, “It’s no use,” and unzipped his duffle bag. He took out a giant axe and, as he did, Carrie saw the other contents of the bag—a shotgun, a cane, a short sword, a vial of silvery fluid, and a handgun.

  He clobbered at the door, splintering it into a million pieces, and broke through it. Together, they pushed the bed over the loose ramparts.

  “She’s covered it again!” Gilbert said upon seeing the sealed floor. He began to chop at the boards with the axe, creating a fresh hole in the ground, and Carrie watched him from behind. She decided that she should be better armed for a situation such as this, and took from the duffle bag a small handgun. It felt really heavy in her arm, as if the contents inside and the metal that made the gun were not regular but denser. Like silver, maybe. Silver was supposed to rid you of demons and werewolves, she had read and heard.

  Before Gilbert could break through the floor, something bulged from beneath and did his job for him, tearing a huge circle in the entire room as it came up.

  “Dear God!” Gilbert cried as the unstopping force pushed him and Carrie out of the room and into the corridor. Something large, something black, something menacing stood in the room, tentacled, scythed, evil.

  “She bested me, Mungo did, and look what she’s done! I’m sorry,” came Sullivan’s hoarse voice. Turning her head around, Carrie saw his ghostly body lying on a stretcher in the corridor.

  “Never you mind that, Sully!” Gilbert said and took out his shotgun. “Whatever this is, we have to kill it!”

  Gilbert shot at the amorphous horror in the room, using his shotgun. It squealed and screamed with each hit, and became wilder with rage. It started to flail its arms around, sending the walls of the room collapsing, like a wrecking-ball. Its eyes glare
d red at Gilbert, marking him for death.

  “Run!” Gilbert said to Carrie, and they sprinted back the way they had come. “It’s too strong. It’s unstoppable!”

  Carrie felt hopelessness and drowning despair rise in her chest and she felt her legs grow jellylike, all weak and flimsy. She could not walk anymore, let alone run. Gilbert’s hands grabbed her and dragged her across the rough corridor, bruising her knees, ripping her jeans.

  She could see it coming behind her, the monster. The new-born. It was closing in on her fast, despite its ever-increasing size. It’s claws and scythes, pincers and talons moved towards her, ready to kill.

  “Gilbert! I have a proposition!” Sullivan floated beside the running man and implored.

  “What is it?” Gilbert asked, keeping one eye on the door leading to the morgue, now in sight, and one eye on the approaching evil. Sullivan whispered something in his ear, and Gilbert stopped pulling Carrie by her arms.

  She realized that the strength which had left her had not yet decided to return. It was the demon. It was siphoning energy from its surroundings. With heavy hands, which felt to be pumped with lead, she took aim at the dark mass approaching her, and shot three times with her handgun. The gun ricocheted and flew out of her limp hands but all three shots had hit.

  It screeched and gained speed, growing wilder, blood-thirstier, and ran towards Carrie. She closed her eyes and curled up in a foetal position, ready to be attacked.

  “Carrie, make for the door!” Gilbert screamed.

  She opened her eyes and saw him glowing. Gilbert was glistening with the same ethereal light which she had associated with Sullivan. They were no longer distinct as man and ghost. They were one.

  Carrie did not need telling twice. She found her energy coming back to her, little by little, and with feeble steps she dragged herself to the door, not wanting to look behind her. The things that she had witnessed in one day would give her nightmares for the rest of her life.