The Haunting Within

by Michelle Burley

  25

  He stood with his back pressed against the doors while he caught his breath. He could hear his heartbeat hammering away in his chest and making a muffled thwump thwump sound over the rushing of his blood in his ears but he could also hear another noise. He held his breath to get a better listen of the sound and realised it was some sort of scratching noise. At first he thought it might have been his throat that was still feeling raw from the terrible smell that was making the noise as he breathed, then he realised he had stopped breathing in order to get a better listen of the sound. It dawned on him all at once where the sound was coming from. He turned to face the front doors eying them as if they were the gates of hell and slowly, nervously he forced himself to put his ear against the wood. As he did so, the scratching stopped and everything went so unnaturally quiet it unnerved Aiden. Just as he was about to move away from the doors an almighty thud slammed against them, shuddering the doors and rattling their hinges. Quickly and with shaking hands he slid the large, heavy metal bolt across the doors and made a run for it. As he was running through the hall towards the stairs, his foot caught on the phone wire and sent him veering towards the wall. His shoulder smashed into it and he fell to the floor, banging his head on the bottom stair as he fell. His body stayed crumpled on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, but his mind drifted away…

  26

  Lisa had been in seven other rooms and found nothing except rotting wood that should have been replaced about twenty years ago (she wondered how the house was still standing) and peeling wallpaper showing smooth plaster underneath. There was nothing out of the ordinary about any of the rooms; they all looked like bedrooms. Aside from another bathroom at the opposite end of the corridor from the one they had already been in, they were all the rooms on the second floor. She had followed the corridor right the way around, coming back on herself. Now standing where she had started she knew she was going to have to venture up to the third floor. There were stairs at the end of the corridor that led the way. She wondered briefly if Aiden had found their mum but she soon discounted that thought, knowing he would have shouted her by now if he had. So onwards and upwards it was then.

  Lisa stood at the staircase to the third floor, contemplating whether or not to venture up; she didn’t want to but she knew she would have to in order to find her mum. With a sigh she leaned against the wall, looking up the dark staircase into the blackness at the top that waited for her. There was no way she wanted to go up there. She thought maybe it wouldn’t seem as bad if she turned on the light switch. There was one on the wall across from her but whether it turned on the lights to the third floor or not was another matter. As she pushed herself away from the wall she felt something shift under her weight. Turning to face the wall she put both of her hands on it and pushed. The rich panelled wood wall gave way under the push and opened up onto another room; a room that was hidden; a room that someone wanted to keep secret…

  27

  Stepping into the room she was surprised to find when she turned the light on that it was some sort of library-come-study. All around the walls there were shelves upon shelves of books and files. It reminded her of the library in Beauty and the Beast, her favourite film as she was growing up. It was amazing and she envied anyone who had a library like this. She loved to read and could be engrossed in a book for hours at a time, her favourite sort being the modern genre of romantic comedy. Lisa wandered around the edge of the room looking at the rows and rows of books on their dusty shelves. Most of the books were about medicine and psychology, of course. Some of the books were so old that their bindings which would at one time have been sturdy and hard were now loose and falling to pieces.

  She took a file from one of the higher shelves and got covered with thick dust as it slid from its resting place. What made her choose that particular file, she didn’t know - it looked exactly the same as all the others. On the cover it read in big, black bold print “Gerald Jenkins”. She opened the cover to the first page and read the first few lines; “Admitted on 27th July 1955. Suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and hallucinations. Attacked a nurse and fractured her jaw on the 30th of August 1955 because he believed “voices in his head told him to“. Had a relatively new procedure of “shock therapy” performed on the 09th of January 1956. First practice of “shock therapy” at this hospital. Given this because he had attacked two more members of staff and five fellow patients after hearing voices which told him to do so”

  At this Lisa closed the folder not wanting to read any further for fear of what it might say. She went to place the file back on the shelf but decided not to, for she was compelled to read a bit more. As she turned the yellow pages they rustled like dry leaves. She stopped on the page that was sub-titled “Patients history” and began reading.

  Gerald Jenkins was born in 1927 in Rotherham. His father was a butcher who owned his own shop and his mother was a midwife. When he was born his mother had suffered a long, agonising birth that finally ended in a forceps delivery which had caused her to lose an enormous amount of blood. She survived only long enough to hold her baby and to name him, and then she tragically died. His father had done his best for him until he was five when he began showing signs of violence when he killed the family cat by putting it through a mangle and was always in trouble at school for fighting. His father had put him into the care system. He was eventually adopted by an elderly couple who lived on the outskirts of Rotherham. He seemed to settle with them until he was fourteen and the elderly lady died of a massive stroke. Gerald then began to rebel and get into all sorts of trouble. He began drinking and running away for days at a time. He was arrested in 1949 for assault on a young woman. He had attacked her at knife point, taken her bag and then he had broken her nose. He was taken to court and subjected to tests by a psychiatrist and was found to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. He said the young woman whom he assaulted had bullied him at school; the woman had never met him before in her life and had never gone to the school he went to. It was said it would be immoral to convict him and put him in prison, so he was sent to her grandfather’s psychiatric hospital under the orders to keep him until 1960 until he would be re-assessed. He was indeed assessed again in 1960 and was found to be progressively worse, so he was detained in the care of the psychiatric hospital. It did not escape Lisa’s notice that he had been found progressively worse after he had endured the shock therapy.

  Lisa turned to a page marked “Patients death”. It stated that Gerald Jenkins died in 1960, three days after his assessment. It read that he died of a heart attack. Beneath there was a list of all the medication he was taking, prescribed by his psychiatric doctor, a one Dr. Arthur Hendry. There was a police report paper-clipped to the last page of the file reading that Gerald Jenkins’ death was sudden and unexpected. The officer who wrote the report, P.C. Higgins concluded that the patient had died of “natural causes”. Lisa was amazed that they were so reluctant to carry out post-mortems back in those days.

  28

  She put the file back and looked at the other files on the shelf and read off a few more names; “Alexander Holmes”, “Marcus Fairchild”, “Leyton Clifford”, “Margaret Reynolds” the files were endless. She reached for the file with the name Margaret Reynolds written on the yellowed front cover. Again the first page was titled “Patients History”. She found that Margaret was born to a builder and a house-wife in 1905. She was raised in Bristol by her parents and lived with them until she was nineteen years of age when she met her future husband, Stephen Reynolds. They married and moved in together within a few months of knowing each other. All was well for a couple of years. There was nothing in her medical records, and nothing from what her family and friends said about her to suggest that she had portrayed any sort of mental illness before, so it was a shock to Lisa to discover why she had ended up in a psychiatric home.

  It was the night of 06th September, 1929. The police were called by Margaret’s mother to the house that Margaret and St
ephen shared. Again, there was a police report attached to the file so Lisa began reading it. When the police arrived at the house they were confronted by Margaret’s hysterical mother. On entering they found Stephen on the kitchen floor with several knife wounds to his chest, abdomen and neck. He was dead when they arrived. On further inspection of the house, the police found Margaret hiding in a cupboard, covered in blood, some of it her own.

  It came to light that that night they had been out for a drink with friends when they had gotten into an argument. They went home where Margaret went to bed. Stephen had stayed up drinking. Later that night he went into their bedroom and dragged Margaret out of bed. He tried to force himself on her, and when she rejected his advances, he became very violent. Margaret told the police how her husband had started pushing her and slapping her across her face. When she still refused his sexual advances he punched her in the face and she fell to the floor. While she was on the floor he stamped on her stomach until he had forced all the wind out of her and she couldn’t move. He then lay on top of her, pinning her down beneath his weight and proceeded to rape her whilst still hitting her and strangling her, causing deep bruising and swelling. When the ordeal was over, Stephen went to bed. Margaret sat up not knowing what to do until eventually she realised the only way she could get out of the relationship. She told the police he had done it before on many occasions and her family verified the cuts and bruises they had so often seen her with because of him. It was also confirmed that there had been numerous times when the police were called out to the house for what was known as “a domestic”. She told the police she could not remember what had happened after Stephen had gone to bed. They put the pieces together and offered the Judge and Jury a horrific account of the night in question. It was suggested that after years of physical and mental abuse from her husband, she could not take it any longer, so she took a large carving knife from the kitchen drawer and went into the bedroom where Stephen lay sleeping. She stabbed him once at first, in the arm which was no more than a shallow flesh wound, and when he had woken and comprehended what she had done he lunged at her. Fearing he would kill her she stabbed him again and again. He wandered to the kitchen where he collapsed and bled to death while she hid in the cupboard.

  The police took photographs of her injuries and these too were enclosed with the file. Lisa looked through the photos with shock and shaking hands. The injuries this poor woman had suffered were horrendous. She was absolutely black and blue. The photos were taken of her with no clothing on from every angle imaginable, therefore leaving her with little dignity. Her whole body was covered with injuries which were listed on the next page; broken cheek-bone, intense swelling to her eye caused by a fractured eye socket and subsequent blindness in that eye once the swelling went down, her head was covered in bald patches where he had ripped her hair out, her finger was broken, her shoulder was dislocated, there were enormous bruises between her legs from when he had held her down to rape her, there were even bite marks on her chest and buttocks. The list of her injuries was huge and saddening. It stated how her womb had been ruined, her ovaries ruptured when he had repeatedly stamped on her, therefore making her infertile, and also how, at the time she was arrested, her arm was healing from a break which had been inflicted around five months previously.

  Lisa completely sympathised with her, but unfortunately the judge had not. She was remanded in a psychiatric hospital for the rest of her life. Apparently she would have had to have been in a poor mental state to kill her husband. Nothing was mentioned about how maybe she just could not take the torture anymore. She was penalised when what she really needed was care and support. The hospital closed down in 1952, so Margaret was transferred here to Lisa’s grandfather’s hospital where she died from a heart attack only three weeks after being transferred. She hastily put the file back and tried her hardest to suppress the intense emotion and sympathy she felt for Margaret. She found it hard to believe that so many people who were probably sane before all deteriorated so much, or were, in Margaret’s case wrongly accused of suffering from mental illnesses, that they had to be put in an insane asylum, because at the end of the day that was what it was no matter how you tried to sugar-coat it. It made her realise how unfair life can be and also how precious. It was a bitter-sweet understanding. Margaret had finally plucked up the courage to get out of the abusive relationship she was in the only way she knew how, and, thinking she would get her life back, she ended up in a psychiatric hospital; a prisoner all over again.

  Wiping away a tear from her eye she turned her back on the wall of files and books. She was glad to be way from all those disturbing documents. It just seemed so awful to her that those poor people had to suffer that humiliation and then have someone write a file that contained their whole lives in it. Why couldn’t people understand that everyone, well, almost everyone, has a right to die with their dignity and pride intact?

  29

  On the wall opposite were more files packed back to back on the built-in bookcase. Lisa went over to them and the edge of the shelf had a piece of card attached to it reading “Staff Files”. Lisa was intrigued to know what kind of people worked here, what it took to care for people who were declared mentally unstable, so she teased a file from the shelf whilst carefully pushing the surrounding ones back on when they all started to come free at the same time, so densely packed was the ledge. The name on the file cover she held in her hands was Christine Perry. Inside the file it stated that Christine was a qualified nurse who had worked at the hospital for two years. It gave accounts of her personal history and her qualifications, the usual things that would be found in staff files. Her references all said she was a caring, hard-working team player who learned quickly and did a thorough job of any task she was given. It showed she had worked in her local doctor’s surgery for four years when she had left college at the age of nineteen. She then got a job at a district hospital and she had worked there for seven years until she was thirty. She decided she wanted to go back to college and study to become a psychiatric nurse so she enrolled in a college here, in Hertfordshire near Lisa’s grandfather’s hospital and worked placements throughout her college course. When she had qualified, she had been offered the job full-time, but had refused. In the file it was written in a scrawled hand that she claimed to be experiencing things that frightened her. She was quoted as saying she would often enter a room and leave the door open, but whilst she was in there the door would slam shut and an ice cold feeling would pass over her. She also claimed to have heard voices coming from the day room when no-one was in there. She asked to be transferred to another hospital because she couldn’t work here any longer.

  Shivering, but not from the cold, Lisa hastily closed the file and put it back. She took out another folder. The name on the folder was Don Watson. She opened and started reading.

  Don was a forty three year old orderly who left the hospital after only three months of being here. He too claimed he experienced things that he shouldn’t have experienced. On one occasion it read that he had been working the night shift when he had just left the kitchen and he saw someone walk into the treatment room. Thinking it was one of the staff - the patients were all locked in their rooms for the night - he followed to see if they wanted a coffee. He walked into the treatment room and saw that no-one was there. Assuming they must have gone elsewhere he turned to leave. After that he claimed to remember nothing until a member of staff found him. The other orderly who had heard him screaming found him cowering in a corner, crying and completely hysterical. He was unresponsive for the better part of an hour and when he did regain his faculties he claimed he did not recall what had happened. He handed in his letter of resignation the very next day. Lisa put the file back, horribly aware she was shaking as she did so. Did Don refuse to believe what he had seen? Was he in denial? Or was it that horrific that his mind had irrevocably erased the cause of his trauma? Either way she could almost feel his fear, so tangible it seemed through the paper. Not daring to
read anymore she backed away from the files that contained horrors which could only be described as supernatural.

  As she moved she felt a floorboard shift under her feet. She got down on all fours and felt around until she found the loose board. She pulled back the circular beige rug that stood beneath the ornate feet of the heavy desk. Hooking her fingers under the floorboard she eased it back until she was able to see underneath it. The foot of the desk prevented her from pulling the board up so she was forced to work with a gap of a few meagre inches. There wasn’t much light from the overhead chandelier or from the lamp which stood shining on the desk, so she gently worked her hand through the space and rummaged around. As she did so she thought she heard a noise from over near the door. Gasping and with one hand wedged under the floor she looked up. There was no-one there but she noticed the door was now pushed to. She had left it wide open hadn’t she? Before she had time to think about it her hand brushed against something hard and smooth. She returned her energy and her focus, to the object and grasped it tightly. Slowly she lifted it out through the boards, scraping her knuckles against the rough edges of the wood, careful not to let it drop back in. As her hand reappeared from the floor with a few scratches and splinters, she saw she was holding a silver tin. Getting to her feet she laid it on the desk while she squeezed the rather painful splinters out of her skin. Sitting at the desk she lifted the lid of the old box, eager to see what was inside.

  30

  Inside the rusted tin was a reel of film, a key and a writing book. Lisa had no idea what was on the reel or what the key was to. Looking around the room she noticed a door she hadn’t seen when she first entered. Pushing on it she met with sturdy resistance. Inspecting the tall rectangular shape from top to bottom Lisa saw a tiny keyhole. Kneeling down and putting her eye to it she saw nothing. The room beyond the door was in total darkness. Retrieving the key from the desk she took it back to the door, her curiosity had peaked and she wanted desperately to find out what was behind the locked door in this hidden room. Fear was all but forgotten, replaced by a child-like eagerness as she let the anticipation of hunting around in a huge mansion like this take over. Inserting the key in the lock, she felt as if she was snooping and wasn’t sure whether to look inside or not. It was only when she remembered that the house was now her mums that she became consoled and only then did she turn the key. It turned smoothly in the lock and opened with a small, almost inaudible click. Lisa pushed the door wide and it moved with ease. The light switch in the room was a pull cord and with a slight yank the room lit up. She was standing in a very small room and Lisa assumed that it would have been at one time part of the large study that had sometime in the homes’ history been cordoned off. She thought it was unlikely that a house of this size would have just one small room in the original layout. In front of her was a big screen that looked like a cinema screen, only smaller. As she tried to open the door wider it banged against something behind it. Lisa stepped in the room and closed the door so she had a bit more space, so tiny was the room. Behind the door was an old fashioned reel projector with one single black leather chair positioned to the left of it. She knew this meant she could watch the film reel now and satisfy her curiosity. Rushing back through to the study she grabbed the reel from the desk. Back inside the small room she tampered with the machine to try and get it working. She was willing herself to hurry because she wanted to know what was on it. Why had it been hidden under the floorboards? Finally after what seemed like ages but was, in fact, only a couple of minutes the cantankerous old machine whirred and the screen came to life in black and white.