by Gaby Triana
“A delicious shock, fuck yeah. Soon little baby Crow was asking the pastor about the underworld and telling him that witchcraft was real and the occult was my main interest.”
I chuckled. “I’m sure that went super well.”
“It didn’t,” he replied, not getting my sarcasm. “They kicked me out.”
“For asking a question?”
“For being inquisitive. I studied it well into my teen years, in secret, and that’s when it got dangerous. For them, not for me. The pastor found out and was so sure I had the Devil in me, he threatened my parents to kick them all out of the congregation and make our lives impossible. I don’t know where you come from, but where I come from, that causes major dishonor.”
“Wow, Crow. I had no idea.”
He picked something out of his teeth. “We had to move. Gulf Coast to East. I got put in a private Baptist school where the libraries don’t have books with photos about chickens and voodoo priests.”
“Where the books only show you one perspective,” I ventured.
“They put blinders on me.”
He nodded, and in that moment, I understood. He wasn’t a dick who randomly spat rude things. He was angry.
“We’re not so different,” I said. “My family’s religious.”
“I knew that.” His gaze flitted irritably to my cross. Only when Crow did that did I ever realize I was touching it. “But unless you’ve been told you’re going straight to Hell by everyone, including your parents, you don’t know what I’ve been through.”
“That happened?” I flinched. “Jesus.”
“They chose God over me.” His eyes cut through my heart. “Kicked me out. At sixteen. They chose the Church over their own kid. According to them, I’d bring evil into their home. So they got rid of me.”
“Oh…I am so, so sorry.”
For once, he didn’t have a quip. His contemplation melted the intensity in his facial muscles. “Don’t be. It was around then that I started dreaming about the Lady every other night. She said there was a way for me to bring her back. I could meet her in person. Once I followed her instructions, she would answer any questions I had about the spirit world.”
“Meet her in person?” I asked. “You mean, you’d be able to see her ghost.”
“Meaning I wouldn’t have to take ten zillion photos to try and see her. I’d see her just like I’m seeing you right now. I wouldn’t need this.” He held up the camera.
I was starting to understand. He was envious of the clairs. Of me. He could “see” ghosts but only by capturing anomalies on camera. He couldn’t see them with his sixth sense, third eye, or whatever. “But why is that so important to you?”
I got the thinnest of smiles in return. “She’ll answer my question.”
“What question?”
“If there’s really a Hell. And if there is…” A muscle in his jaw tensed. “Will I end up there?”
“Oh, Crow.”
I strolled up and gave him a hug. I hadn’t held anyone this long in a while, and through my hands, I saw a bitter, scared kid wishing his parents would love him enough to defend him, a boy wondering how and why he’d been forsaken, and to what end?
Crow was a lot like me, more than he’d ever know.
Which was probably why he hated me.
During the day, the Sunlake Springs was beautiful in a sad, longing way. She was an aging movie star who’d once been glamorous but now had no leading roles and only five cats in her audience. At night, the hotel’s walls grew taller, its shadows stretching from floor to ceiling. A desperation took over, bound and gagged whispers longing for release. It was all fun and games during the day, but when the sun went down, I didn’t want to be caught alone in certain areas.
I explored the halls while there was still sunlight.
In the upper desolate halls, I found no less than eight or nine paintings of the Lady of the Lake hanging askew on the walls. Some depicted a beautiful nude white woman with long blond hair, like Botticelli’s Venus on her shell, emerging from the sea. Others depicted her wearing a flowing nightgown, stepping out of the water under the moonlight as lake grass artfully clung to her curvy form. In my favorite, she appeared with a long scaly fish tail, a mythical mermaid, only Cypress trees and sawgrass filled the background instead of the ocean.
Her legend was the mythos and soul of this place, but to Crow, she represented love. Maybe hope. She was the object of his affection and attention. Did she really want to come alive? Like the Sunlake Springs, the Lady of the Lake also seemed like an old actress begging for one last curtain call, while Crow was the lone janitor in the front row, applauding her performance, tossing red roses of adoration onto the stage.
Wandering in and out of rooms, I wondered if the Lady was real, or if Crow’s PTSD-suffering teen brain had made her up to replace his parents and community. It’d be no different than someone’s relationship with Jesus during a time of loneliness.
The sun’s rays filtered through the west windows at lower angles, bending light into orange and reddish tones. In the third-floor hallway, I approached the grand atrium’s glass walls which penetrated the hospital vertically and reflected the glow. From each floor, one could peer into the atrium from above and see a world of vegetation, the mermaid fountain, and the chained chandelier below.
In my mind, I heard a scream, but I knew it wasn’t real-time—it was a memory of two days ago, when we’d all heard a shout echoing through the building. We never figured out who it was. That was how the Sunlake operated—in bits and pieces, a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.
I paused a few feet away, my heartbeat pounding.
I hadn’t visited this very spot yet. This wasn’t where I’d panicked before, but seeing the glass structure sent a spike of anxiety through me just the same. A discarded wheelchair sat in the middle of a cloud of suspended, illuminated dust particles, next to a rusted old gurney blocking the passage. Someone, a long time ago, had sat in that chair. Someone had lain on that gurney. Carefully, I stepped up and wheeled the gurney out of the way, letting go of its cold metal quickly.
Even so, I couldn’t pass.
My little starshine, sleep, oh, so tight
My little moonshine, dream with the night
When you awaken, Love you will be
My little sunshine Heaven gave me…
A woman floated into the hallway. Her hair was soiled and sweaty, her skin a sallow gray. She wore an oversized hospital gown. I hadn’t seen her a moment ago, but there she was, standing with feet apart, shivering with something in her hands. Down her legs, rivers of bright red blood streamed and blended with the sweat on her legs, thinning the rivulets, splintering them into more rivers that leaked onto the floor. In her hands, she held a roundish, dark garnet fleshy…thing…with ligaments hanging off the sides. Droplets of blood dripped from the ligaments.
Miss, please…
…please help…
She could see me. I froze, my body draining of reason, and breath. She could see me. I could see her, just like the woman in the kitchen. I clenched my eyes shut and clung to my little cross.
My little starshine, sleep, oh, so tight…
MISS! The woman—the spirit—called me. Miss, please.
“What…” I could barely utter a word. What do you want me to do? I tried asking, but the words got lodged in my throat.
She held the blob of flesh toward me, her lined expression pained and full of regret. They took it. They took it out of me…
“Out?” I stared at the bloody mass. It might’ve been a stillborn, or a…or…I couldn’t think, couldn’t reason in any way that might help her.
The woman gave a painful cry, clutched her belly with one hand, the other still holding the blob, cringing as her insides squeezed out a gush of blood containing heavy clots from between her calves. The clotted fluid slid down the insides of her legs, pooling around her feet.
They took it!
“What did they…?” I managed to whisper
.
I may have been imagining this, the building’s history playing tricks on me. I couldn’t tell what was real, what wasn’t. All I knew was it was twilight, the woman cast no shadow.
My womb. They took it.
They took your womb??
She nodded. Without asking.
Then, drawing the hemorrhaging mass of flesh toward her possessively, the woman projected it forward, hurled her bleeding, extracted uterus at me. It caught the edge of my arm with a wet slap. I felt its heat, its thud against my skin, the slickness of membranes and skin cells gone to waste. I screamed without sound, covered my eyes with trembling hands.
“Go away, go away…go away,” I chanted in time to my ragged breaths.
When I finally gathered enough courage to peek through my slatted fingers, nothing was there. The hallway was empty, only an old gurney and wheelchair blocking the path.
I pushed past both, bolting past the atrium with eyes closed again, heading for any room that didn’t feel oppressed. In the northwest corner, I ducked into a random junk-filled guest room to catch my breath. Something moved, a shadow that skittered along the wall. Logic told me it was the silhouette of a bird flying past the window, but after what I’d just been through, I couldn’t be sure.
I sank to the floor and sat there, holding my head with my hands, waiting for my body to stop trembling. I felt that sense of air displacement again, like an invisible body standing near me, sound waves and energy rushing around it. A moment later, it was gone. Was she following me? The bleeding woman in the hallway? As much as she needed help, there was nothing I could do for her.
Who the hell was she, and why would anyone take her womb?
I was about to sprint downstairs to rejoin the others when something in the adjacent room made a sound. A human sound. A metal drawer closing. Footsteps. Sneakers. “Hello?” I called.
A familiar voice replied, “Mori?”
From the rich baritone, it had to be Wilky. I pressed a hand to my chest to still my heart. I couldn’t do this again, this wandering-around-by-myself thing. I wasn’t used to it.
“It’s Valentina.” I made my way into the room.
Wilky seemed shaken but relieved. He was holding onto a metal file cabinet. “Oh, hey.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“No.” He pulled a file from a rusted old drawer and took a seat on a stool that tipped slightly when he put his weight on it. “I hate doing this.”
“Looking through files?” I was happy to have normal conversation to distract me, though I couldn’t get the woman out of my mind.
He nodded, riffled through papers and tossed a file on the floor. “What were you doing up here?”
“Stupidly exploring,” I replied.
He looked at me with sad, tired eyes, like he could tell I’d seen something. If he did, he said nothing.
“Sorry for intruding,” I said. “I didn’t know you were here. You want me to leave?”
“Of course not.” He forced a new expression, happy for the distraction, it seemed. A sigh escaped him. “I get inside my head too much. I thought it’d be a good idea to come up here and check records again, but…”
“But what?”
“It’s pointless.”
“How?”
“I never find anything. I come up here every few days. I’m obsessed with these…” He kicked a file cabinet with his shoe. “Garbage. Tons of records that amount to shit. I can’t prove anything, but I know this place was something else at one point. I can’t prove it. It’s fucking maddening.” He kicked a rusted wire trash can, too. It bounced off the wall and rolled away.
I felt his fury and sense of responsibility to provide his family with answers. “You’re frustrated. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine.” He shook his head. “I have to accept that I’ll never know the truth. I’ll just have to take my family’s word for it. If history was erased, it was erased. Fuck the victors.”
“I don’t…” I had no idea what he meant.
“The victors,” he explained. “History is written by the winners, the oppressors.”
“Ah,” I replied. “What else do you think this building was used for?”
“Not think, know. I know it was used for evil.”
I bristled at his word choice.
“The sanatorium was meant to heal people, but nobody healed, Vale. Ninety percent of patients were sent here to die. The veteran’s hospital didn’t go well either. One association’s records show a staggering eight-five percent death rate for any patient unlucky enough to have been registered here after World War II.”
“Holy shit.”
“Women sent here weren’t treated well either.”
The vision of the woman holding her own uterus, claiming that they’d taken it without her permission would haunt me for the rest of my life. If I could see my own father and talk to him with the same clarity as I’d done with her, however, I would get over my fear in a heartbeat.
“Then, of course, the kitchen fire during the resort years was the nail in the coffin. It pretty much failed immediately. Something about this place…” I could see his hands shaking. “They say it’s an energy vortex, but it’s more than that. Why do so many terrible things happen here?” he asked without waiting for an answer, not that I had one. “Nothing healed here. Nothing. Only pain succeeded.”
His anger was so thick, I felt responsible for it. “What else do you think happened here? You said history was erased.”
He paced around the file cabinet, stood at the window, looking out at the sunset. “When it was closed to the public, sometime between the mental hospital and the wellness resort, this hotel was a meeting place. A secret meeting place,” he stressed. “I know because my mother’s family has lived in this area going back as far as a hundred years. They know.”
“A meeting place for who?” I had a feeling for whom, but I needed to hear it from him.
“The Brotherhood of Klans,” he breathed.
I stared at him, holding my breath, until he looked at me.
He did, and in that moment, I wanted to apologize for the sins of the world as though they all belonged to me, as though I’d caused them myself.
“And that tree you found by the lake?” An odd expression that looked like a smile morphed into a wistful smirk, full of pain. “Was where they lynched people who looked like me.”
FOURTEEN
The memory of two nights ago slipped into my mind, when I’d sat by the lake staring at that twisted tree. I was so sure I’d been in someone else’s body. My throat, the tugging, burning, and torches.
“Who did you lose?” I asked.
Wilky had never directly told me he’d lost anyone, but I knew his determination to find paperwork was personal. “My great uncle,” he said. “He went missing in 1969. Went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came home. A case was opened with Volusia County, but we know how useful police investigations turn out for Black people.”
“I’m sorry.”
He nodded and returned to peruse the files. If I could find evidence of Wilky’s uncle’s disappearance just to lift that heaviness off him, restore a bit of his smile, I would. Against my better judgment, I held his arm.
He paused his paper shuffling.
I listened, through my fingertips.
The room shifted, knocking me off balance. Vertigo caught hold, the walls tilted. I grabbed onto the file cabinet to keep from keeling over. When the room righted itself, I blinked and focused on his face until two Wilkys became one.
“What happened?” he asked.
I let go of his arm. I hadn’t told anyone about my ability. Until recently, I hadn’t even realized what it was. “I saw someone in the hallway before I found you.”
“Who?”
“A woman. A patient. She…”
Wilky listened to my every word.
“I think you’re right about terrible things happening here. She didn’t seem happy with the things they did
to her.”
“Was she in the south wing?”
“Yes. She said they took her womb.” It sounded crazy uttering that out loud.
Wilky searched the floor. He picked up a short stack of files and thumbed through them.
“What are you looking for?”
“I’ve read all these files over the course of a year, Vale. Not one says anything about hysterectomies.”
“That’s what I thought. It was a psychiatric hospital, not a medical one.”
“Right.” Wilky opened a file, pointed to a doctor’s scrawling. “But I always wondered what this meant. Patient suffers from schizophrenia. Mentally unstable. A harm to herself and others. Sterilization recommended.”
I stared at the file as he held it out. “So, because a woman suffered from mental illness, they prevented her from reproducing? Is that even legal?” Horror at the thought rippled through me. The woman had held out her uterus—her uterus.
“Were lynchings legal?” Wilky countered. “That’s my point. This shit isn’t in the books. We’ll never find it here. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” He slapped the file closed.
“That is insane.” I gawked at him. “Why isn’t anyone talking about this? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“There’s a lot nobody talks about.”
I was back to feeling sick to my stomach. People needed to learn about the history here. We couldn’t just let it fade into obscurity. The truth would mar the Sunlake’s reputation. It would block Crow’s attempts to highlight the building’s beauty, would sabotage his efforts to bring this place back to life, but it’d be the truth.
Wilky’s eyes snapped toward the east wall. “Hear that?”
The air felt alive with a buzzing vitality, like molecules bouncing off each other, making the atmosphere itself seem to quake. I did hear something faint. “What is that?”
Wilky took my hand. “Let’s go. We need to shake this off. They’re starting.”
“Starting what?”
“The mock ritual.”
It felt nice to have his hand hold mine, and because he wasn’t thinking about anything negative anymore, I didn’t “see” anything negative in his touch. Wilky tugged me out the door, down the hall, to the stairwell. We dropped down in a frenetic rush of twists and turns.
