Robert used the flashlight from his cellphone to illuminate the printed document within.
Robert,
Pinedale Hospital has been closed for nearly a decade—abandoned. Until now.
A few nights ago, there was an awakening of sorts, and the Seventh Ward is now thriving, when it should remain silent. When it needs to remain silent.
We need you to go there and take care of this mess. In return for your services, you will receive $100,000.
Sean
Robert read the letter a second time, then a third. It was transactional, for sure, but he also noted some strange choices of words.
Like we need you, when the only name at the bottom was Sean’s.
“What?” he asked, a smirk creeping onto his face. “No Uncle Tom or Aunt May to go and visit?”
Sean didn’t smile. Instead, he pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit it.
“This is not a game, Robert,” Sean said after a drag. “No matter how much you or Cal or Shelly want to make it one. There is…” Sean let his sentence trail off, and Robert got the impression that the man had already said more than he’d wanted to.
“Go on,” Robert encouraged him.
But Sean remained silent.
Robert put the letter back into the envelope and then tapped it against his palm for a moment.
Then he held it out to Sean.
“Thank you, but I’m not interested.”
This time, a flash of emotion crossed Sean’s face. He tried to hide it by taking another drag of his cigarette, but it stayed for just long enough for Robert to pick it up.
And in that moment, Robert knew he had the upper hand.
“This is not negotiable, Robert,” Sean said flatly.
Robert shrugged.
“Look, you weren’t there. You don’t know how horrible it was to see little Patricia chewing on a goddamn rat, and that psychopath James Harlop with the fucking flapping neck hole.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Not interested in seeing that ever again, Sean. No thanks. I’ll find another way to make some cash, to stay afloat.”
Sean eyed him suspiciously, and Robert thought for a second that the man might have figured out that he was being played. After all, there really was no real way for them to make any money, at least none that he hadn’t already considered and summarily dismissed. Still, Robert held his ground, staring into the man’s cold eyes, trying his best not to waver.
The old Robert Watts would have backed down, would have walked away. But he wasn’t the old Robert anymore.
Sean sighed.
“What do you want, Robert? One fifty? I can probably get the price up to one fifty.”
Robert shook his head emphatically.
“I don’t want more money—I want answers.”
His final word hung in the air like a foul smell. Sean seemed to internalize this while he smoked the rest of the cigarette in silence.
“One question,” the man said at last, flicking the wasted butt to the ground. “You send these ghosts back to where they belong and I’ll answer one question.”
Robert was like a child on Christmas morning. He could barely contain himself.
“Great. One hundred grand and a question. It’s a deal.”
Robert held out his hand, but Sean just looked at it.
“How do I let you know when we are done?”
Sean’s brow furrowed.
“I’ll know—you just worry about the Seventh Ward.”
The look sent a shiver up Robert’s spine.
The Seventh Ward.
Unlike last time, he would make sure to get Shelly to look it up on the Internet to get a feel for what they were up against before rushing in like he had at the Harlop Estate.
“Will do,” Robert said. After another awkward silence, he took this as his cue to leave, and turned with the intention of doing just that when Sean’s voice brought him back.
“And Robert?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t even think about going back. You are to deal with the quiddity in the Seventh Ward, and that’s it. Do you understand?”
Back… there was no need to clarify to where Sean was referring.
A sudden, pleasant warmth overcame Robert, and he felt his cheeks flush.
“Got it—I won’t be going back,” he lied.
Then he turned and made his way back to the Harlop Estate in a very different mood from the one he had left it in just a few minutes ago.
Chapter 6
FOURTEEN YEARS AGO
The odd conversation in the lounge over coffee with Andrew Shaw signaled a change in the Seventh Ward and in Dr. Mansfield. The man’s words had disturbed him, and while nothing Andrew had said or done was in and of itself dangerous, he decided to put the brakes on his special treatment. Andrew took the news surprisingly well, and it didn’t even seem to bother him when word got around that Justine had been suspended for a week for sharing patient information. Seeing no further regression, Dr. Mansfield eventually started to trust Andrew again.
Andrew’s strange behavior and odd comments constituted a momentary relapse triggered by direct questioning of a diagnosis that was similar to his own, he wrote in his case files. Comments/actions not indicative of future behavior.
Shortly after Justine returned from suspension, the Seventh Ward received six patients in a single week, including the incredibly difficult Mrs. Dupuis, who came with a delightful personality baggage of being a nymphomaniac. And as an 80-year-old malnourished, crass woman, she made everyone, including Dr. Mansfield, uncomfortable when this particular personality took over.
What was he to do? Just let the woman scream for hours on end while he tried to deal with Giselle and the other patients? Interviewing these patients, getting to the root of their problems, took time. Time he didn’t have. Which was why he hadn’t let Justine go after her egregious breach of protocol, and why he eventually brought Andrew back into the fold, despite not being fully comfortable with the idea. To mitigate the risk, this time Andrew was given specific instructions, in the rare case that he would be with the patients and Dr. Mansfield wasn’t present:
1) He was in no way to attempt to treat the other patients;
2) The questions he was to ask were to be read directly from a script that Mansfield himself had prepared;
3) In no way was he to deviate from the script, irrespective of patient response;
4) He was to take detailed notes of patient responses in a notebook that he had been given.
It had been three days since he had hesitantly given Andrew this responsibility, and it was going better than he could have expected—both for him, in terms of lessening his workload, and for Andrew. Almost immediately, Dr. Mansfield saw a change in the man; he was returning to his more youthful, vibrant self—the way he had been before the incident in the lounge.
It didn’t seem to bother the other patients, either; if anything, Dr. Mansfield had the general impression that they liked being interviewed by one of their own. Like they too could one day be like Andrew, part of a functioning, albeit highly structured ‘society.’ Some of them had even started calling Andrew ‘Dr. Shaw.’ which so long as Andrew wasn’t the one to initiate, Dr. Mansfield didn’t see a problem with.
Three days…for three days, this new scenario worked well.
But that all changed again when Dr. Mansfield lost his temper.
Normally even-tempered even during the most stressful of times, for some reason the caustic combination of lack of sleep and frustration eventually came to a head for Dr. Mansfield. The last thing he wanted to do was to shout at Andrew, especially given his history. But Mrs. Dupuis had been screaming for hours, and it was driving him insane. She had been given a hefty dose of Ativan the night before, and Dr. Mansfield still had to wait another few hours before he could sedate her again.
And for whatever reason, he just lost it.
“Fuck! Andrew, go take care of that woman!” he hissed, thrusting the manila envelope that
he was holding at Justine. The woman dropped it, spilling papers all over the floor. For a second, Andrew just stood there, eying Justine as she bent to pick them up.
Dr. Mansfield resisted the urge to reach over and shake the man.
“Andrew, did you hear me? Go to the fucking room and take care of her! Make her shut up!”
Andrew’s face become a deep crimson, and Dr. Mansfield instantly regretted raising his voice.
None of his patients responded well to threats or shouts. If anything, it only made their condition worse.
Dr. Mansfield shook his head and opened his mouth to apologize, but before he could get the words out, Andrew turned on his heels and quickly headed down the hall toward Mrs. Dupuis room.
The man’s gait had changed. It was slower, more deliberate.
Maybe this isn’t such a good idea. Maybe—
Justine distracted his thoughts by handing him the folder again. Dr. Mansfield stared at it for a moment, then peered up at Justine’s doughy face.
“Sorry,” he grumbled, turning back to Andrew.
The man was already gone.
Dr. Mansfield squinted down the hallway, wondering if maybe he had imagined the change in posture, the slowed gait.
I should check out the notes that he’s been taking. And maybe it’s about time I started paying a little more attention to his needs, and not so much my own.
Dr. Mansfield opened his mouth to ask Justine to retrieve the notepad when one of his other nurses suddenly appeared, her face flush.
“Betsy? What’s wrong?”
The woman took a deep breath.
“It’s Giselle. You should come quick—she’s having another fit.”
Dr. Mansfield swore under his breath, then thrust the folder back into Justine’s open hands.
In the end, if he had just taken a moment to look at Andrew’s notebook earlier, things would have been different.
Very different.
***
Giselle’s fits ran the gamut from simple curses to extremely violent depending on who had control at that moment.
Betsy had been right to come get Dr. Mansfield; this was a bad one. It appeared as if a new personality had emerged, one that was just plain mean. Speaking in tongues, Giselle had waited until one of the orderlies had come in close to strap her down when she bit him. And it was no love bite, either; an apple-sized hunk of flesh hung from the man’s arm.
The orderly, Vern, was a man that Dr. Mansfield had worked with for many years, so when he claimed that his hand shot out by accident, on impulse, he was prone to believe him. But Vern was a big man, a man who spent all of his time outside the ward in the gym. So when his hand had lashed out, it had shut Giselle up instantly.
Dr. Mansfield didn’t think the young girl’s jaw was broken, but it was still going to leave a nasty bruise. The Seventh Ward wasn’t popular for visits—most of the friends and family of those that were admitted came for the first few weeks, months maybe, but with time, the frequency between them became longer and longer, until they inevitably stopped altogether. Especially if it appeared, from the outside, at least, that there was little improvement in their condition. It was just his luck that Giselle so happened to be one of the few patients that received regular visitations. Giselle’s father, a partner in a medium-sized law firm, came for a supervised visit every Friday at exactly 11 AM. Only for twenty minutes, but still…today was Thursday.
Dr. Mansfield commissioned one of the nurses to tend to Vern’s bite while he watched on, trying to figure out how he was going to deal with this scenario. With funding as tight as it was—requiring him to use a patient to perform the interviews—upsetting a patient’s father, a lawyer, no less, was not going to help his bottom line.
He rubbed his fingers in his eyes, trying and failing to force away the fatigue that wrapped his very bones.
“Go home, Vern,” he said with a sigh.
“Wha—why? It was an accident. Shit, I wouldn’t punch a girl, you know that, Doc.”
Dr. Mansfield, eyes still closed, nodded.
“I know, but you should still go home. Take an extended, long weekend.”
The man chewed the inside of his lip before answering.
“With pay? Am I getting paid for this?”
Questions about pay reminded him of Andrew and Justine, and how the lack of funding had driven him to expand their responsibilities beyond what he should have.
Responsibilities…a patient seeing patients? Taking notes? What was I thinking?
But that was the thing; he wasn’t thinking.
“Yeah, fine. Come back Monday,” he said, finally opening his eyes. With a nod, Dr. Mansfield turned and left, heading directly for Andrew Shaw’s room.
His eyes, dreary moments before, widened in surprise when he opened the door to find Justine sitting alone on the cot, her back to him.
“Justine? What are you doing in here?” he demanded. After her suspension, he had done his best to keep the two separated.
When there was no answer, Dr. Mansfield stepped into the small, eight-by-eight-foot room.
“Justine?” he asked again, raising his voice.
When she still didn’t answer, he reached out and laid a hand on her shoulder.
“I’m talking to—”
Justine turned her head slowly, a strange expression on her pale face.
“He’s onto something,” she said slowly.
“What?” Dr. Mansfield’s eyes darted to the notebook that lay open in her lap.
“I think Dr. Shaw knows how to fix these people.”
Dr. Mansfield made a face.
“What the hell are you talking about? Give me—” He reached for the notepad, but she pulled it away from him.
“He can heal people,” she hissed. “He knows!”
“Justine! Snap out of it!”
Dr. Mansfield aggressively reached around her thick body and wrenched the notebook from her hands.
“What’s wrong with you?” he spat. “Take the rest of the day off, Justine. Think about—”
His eyes instinctively lowered to the open page of the notebook, and he immediately lost his train of thought.
What in the living hell?
Written on the top line was GISELLE STALL, in solid black letters. But the rest of the page, indeed, every single line contained the same sentence written over and over again in perfect cursive.
…there’s someone inside me…there’s someone inside me…there’s someone inside me…
Dr. Mansfield whispered a curse, and then flipped to the next page. It was the same as the first, only with a different name at the top: MARGARET DUPUIS.
…there’s someone inside me…
He quickly flipped to the next page, and then the next. The entire notebook was filled with the same insane sentence, repeated hundreds, if not thousands of times.
Dr. Mansfield was about to close the notebook, but he got to the last page and his heart suddenly skipped a beat.
The name at the top was his own: DR. GEORGE MANSFIELD.
The lights in Andrew’s room suddenly switched to red, and a piercing alarm suddenly filled the Seventh Ward.
“Shit,” he swore, tossing the notepad onto the bed beside Justine.
Adrenaline flooded his system, momentarily displacing the feeling of dread and revulsion at the notebook that he had just read. Ignoring Justine, who was still staring at him, Dr. Mansfield rushed to the doorway, nearly crashing into an orderly that barreled in.
“Dr. Mansfield! Dr. Mansfield!”
The man doubled over, trying to catch his breath before continuing. His eyes were wide, his face pale.
“What? What is it?” he demanded. “What’s going on?”
When the man continued his heavy breathing, and held up a hand to ask for a moment, Dr. Mansfield pushed by him and entered the hallway.
In all of his decade plus of working in the Seventh Ward, Dr. Mansfield had only heard the alarm go off three times. Once had been a fals
e alarm, while the other two had been suicide attempts.
Only one had been successful.
Dr. Mansfield had promised himself that he would never let it happen again.
“It’s Mrs. Dupuis,” the orderly huffed from behind him. “Please, Doctor, you need to hurry!”
Dr. Mansfield immediately broke into a sprint.
Please…not again.
Chapter 7
Robert was surprised that Shelly of all people was the one to object.
“No…no fuckin’ way.” Robert tried to get the letter back from her, but she pulled it away and leveled her green eyes at him. “The last time was the last time, remember?”
“The only time?” Cal offered.
Shelly shot him a look.
“I don’t know what you are all excited about—you nearly crapped your pants when you saw Jacky. Imagine if it had been you in the basement dealing with James Harlop and not Robert? What then? We’d all be swallowed up and transported to his own personal hell by now.”
Robert’s thoughts went immediately to the feeling that had enveloped him as he stood on the soft shore of the Marrow, staring at the rolling waves. The way he had been so warm—not hot, but fulfilled.
If only they knew…
“Robert? What’s wrong with you?” Shelly snapped, and Robert shook his head. He reached for the letter, and although she pulled back again, he managed to snag it from her.
“Look,” he began, conscious that what he was about to say was going to come out patronizing, but unable to help it. “We need the money, Shelly—it’s a hundred grand. Shit, with that money, we could live here for a couple of years…and with no worries about money, you and Cal can sit here and drink and bicker all you want.”
Shelly growled.
“And what about you? You were shitting your pants too, scared of the fucking dark, if I must remind you. And now, what? You think you’re a fucking bona fide Ghostbuster?” She threw her hands up and turned her back to him. “All this talk about money is great, fucking fantastic, but you get grabbed by one of these apparitions and get sent to the Marrow…you can’t take your goddamn greenbacks with you there, Robert.”
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