Robert swallowed hard, and he felt guilty at the vehemence of his previous comments. This man had helped him.
Saved him.
What it meant for Dr. Mansfield, however, was unclear, but Robert thought that the man’s actions wouldn’t be without penalty.
“Thank you,” he whispered. The man grunted an affirmation, then the clasp on his wrist jangled and the wrap came free. Robert immediately pulled his arm away from the man, careful not to touch him, and then he set to work on the other strap.
When both straps were released, he alternated rubbing his wrists. There were thick red binding marks on each and a dull ache in his bones. Dr. Mansfield hadn’t been lying when he’d said he was seizing; his body must have been thrashing pretty hard to generate such a deep soreness.
With his upper body now free, he sat up, crying out at the pain that shot up his right calf.
After several deep breaths through clenched teeth, Robert finally collected himself.
“Why?” he asked Dr. Mansfield, who had respectfully taken a step back from the gurney.
The man shrugged.
“I swore an oath—an oath to save lives, Robert.” The man looked down at his hands, and the corners of his lips turned downward. “It doesn’t matter what form I take.”
Robert eyed the man quizzically. Unlike the members of the Harlop family, Dr. Mansfield seemed to be acutely aware of his situation.
Of the fact that he was, indeed, dead.
A loud crash from somewhere outside his room suddenly drew his gaze from the doctor to the window to the hallway. There was a dim glow of light coming from somewhere just out of view, and Robert suddenly snapped back to reality.
Cal and Shelly were here somewhere.
“I have to get out of here,” he muttered.
He quickly reached down and began undoing the strap on his left ankle. Then he moved to his right, but his eyes locked on his calf and he froze.
There was a massive chunk of skin and muscle missing, but this wasn’t the most unnerving thing. There were three dark, burnt smudges that extended almost all the way around his now much thinner lower leg. And they ended in sharp points.
Leland’s handprint… where he touched me.
Robert tried to remember that man’s face that he had caught a glimpse of when the man had turned his gaze upward, but he couldn’t. His mind had erected a mental block, protecting him from the horror. Just thinking about it, however, made his entire being well with anxiety and disgust.
Robert shook these feelings away and finished unstrapping himself. With a wince, he managed to lower himself off the gurney. Pain shot up his entire right leg, but he was at least thankful that Leland had cauterized the wound, stopping the bleeding.
That was something, at least.
With a limp, he managed to shuffle forward. He found his clothes balled on the floor and quickly put them on, his hand immediately going to the front right pocket. His fingers began massaging Amy’s photograph.
Then he looked around. When his eyes fell on the red LED light by the door, his heart sunk.
“I think I can help with that,” Dr. Mansfield said suddenly, and Robert turned to him inquisitively. The man was holding a keycard up to the limited light, and Robert couldn’t help but smile.
He held it out to him, and Robert carefully took it, making sure not to make contact. Then he went to the door and pressed it up against the reader. It beeped, then turned green.
“Alright, let’s go find Cal and Shelly…and Dr. Shaw,” he said to himself, before pulling the door wide and stepping into the hallway.
Chapter 32
The sound of the door falling inward was impossibly loud. Cal cringed, but immediately jumped over it and into the hallway, thankful to be out of the room full of ghosts, even if they were the good guys.
Yeah, good ghosts…what the hell is the world coming to?
Shelly quickly followed him out, and then he couldn’t help but turn back to the room that they had just escaped from. With the door gone, some ambient lighting—where is the light coming from? Is there a window somewhere? Aren’t we belowground?—and with a heavy squint, he focused on Danny’s outline. The man took a small step forward, and other figures at his sides, the other quiddity, stepped forward as well. For an instant, Cal thought that they were going to continue moving, to renege on their agreement and come crashing into the hallway with them. But they stopped, and Cal thought he saw Danny’s lips move, mouthing the word, Home.
Cal nodded, then turned to Shelly when the quiddity receded back into the shadows from whence they came.
She had a wide look in her eyes, and her blonde hair was clinging in sweaty strips to her forehead. It was then that he realized her bravado, her courage, had been sapped, that what had happened in the room had taken it from her.
It was up to him now.
But home…
As if reading his thoughts, Shelly said, “Home? How can we send them all home?”
Cal reached for her, pulling her in close.
“Shh,” he said, his eyes darting back to the now dark room.
Shelly pushed him away and put the blowtorch back in her backpack and zipped it, after first checking that the end had cooled enough to not risk melting the bag. After she was done, she looked up at him again, but this time when she spoke, her voice was softer.
“How, Cal?”
Cal bit his lip as he thought about it.
Yeah, Cal? How can we find an object that means something to six or seven tortured souls? Souls that we haven’t met before? We don’t even now their names…
“We’ll—I’ll think of something. But for now, let’s find Robert. Maybe he knows what to do.”
Shelly slipped the bag over her shoulder and stood.
“And Frankenstein? What about him and his fucking monster? I haven’t heard—”
A bellow suddenly ripped through the hallway, echoing up and down for so long that Cal thought that it would continue on forever. Eventually, however, the sound faded, and he was left in the near darkness again, staring at Shelly with identical, horrified expressions.
Yeah, there was also that to deal with.
He hoped to Christ that Robert had some ideas.
The sound of a beep and a door opening behind him made him spin on his heels. Shelly instinctively moved behind him, but without his crowbar, Cal felt like an incredibly inept ninja in a black bathrobe. So he did what any man would do in his situation: he primed his body to run.
And he almost did—he almost ran. But when the door opened and a haggard-looking Robert stepped out, he froze instead. Unsure of what he was seeing, if it was real or not, he simply gaped.
Shelly, on the other hand, gasped.
“Robert!” she exclaimed, and then ran to him, nearly knocking Cal down in the process. But when she made it to within ten feet of him, she stopped cold.
Cal suddenly regained control of his body and also stepped forward.
“Shelly? What’s wrong?” When she didn’t answer, he picked up his pace. “Robbo? You okay?”
The man had a far-off look in his eyes, one that Cal recognized after his encounter with James Harlop in the basement.
Did he…?
“I’m fine,” he said suddenly. Cal’s long-time friend took a step forward, but it was labored with his right leg not so much bending as it was dragging. And he was grimacing.
Shelly pointed at him, and Cal thought that the woman had finally snapped. He reached out to lower her arm, but she resisted.
And then he saw it too.
There was a man behind Robert, slowly creeping forward. He was wearing a lab coat and had an old-fashioned pair of glasses on his nose, the kind with the beaded strings that librarians had rendered clichéd.
“Uhh, Robert,” he said slowly. “You might want to come over here.”
Robert limped forward another two feet.
“Hurry, Robbo…there’s someone behind you!”
Chapter 33
“Wha—wha—what?” Shelly blubbered.
“I’m—I’m going to help you,” Dr. Mansfield said, his gaze low.
“Robbo? What the fuck is going on? Is he—?”
Robert nodded.
“Yeah, he is.”
Cal frowned and nodded his head.
“Ah, good, because for a second there, I thought you were losing your fucking mind.”
For good measure, Robert took a lateral step away from the doctor, who stayed in place. The movement sent pain shooting up his leg again. Leland Black may have cauterized the wound, but he hadn’t done anything about the pain.
“Did he—?”
“No,” Robert answered quickly, not wanting him to finish the sentence and have Dr. Mansfield say something that he wouldn’t be able to explain later.
“What the fuck’s wrong with your leg?” Shelly asked.
Robert resisted looking down at his jeans. Although covered, the lower part of his right leg looked more narrow to him nonetheless. That was another thing that he didn’t have time, or perhaps even know how, to explain. He had a feeling deep down inside, spurred by his interaction with Leland, that he and Cal and Shelly would be best served purging the Seventh Ward of quiddity sooner rather than later.
There was something about the roiling sky of faces that made him think the longer the quiddity stayed here, the more powerful Leland would become.
“Nothing,” Robert said quickly. “Just a story to ha-ha about another day. But right now, we have work to do.”
He took a step forward, and was shocked to see that Shelly actually matched his movements…she took a step backward.
“I’m fine, Shelly. Really. We need to get to work.”
Still, despite his words, he waited for her to make the first move. But she didn’t; it was Cal who stepped forward and wrapped his arm around her shoulders.
“C’mon,” he said to her loud enough for Robert to hear. “He’s fine. Now let’s go bust some ghosts.”
She hesitated, but a slight tug spurred her to move. Robert didn’t blame her for her apprehensive attitude. After all, he was limping, probably looked deathly pale from the blood loss, and there was the ghost of a dismembered doctor standing to his left.
Yeah, Robert probably would have been just a wee bit hesitant to do the tango with himself as well.
A loud grunt suddenly filled the hallway, and all of their eyes shot up, including Dr. Mansfield’s, searching for its origins. It was louder than it had been before.
“We need to get out of the hallway,” Robert said with a swallow after the sound faded. His eyes eventually landed on the rows of doors that lined both sides of the hallway. He wasn’t keen on going back into a cell, but the prospect of being trapped out here by the sutured beast without a plan—like before—was unfathomable. “Let’s get into one of those.”
Cal raised an eyebrow.
“You have a key?”
Robert held up the keycard with Dr. Mansfield’s photo on it.
Cal smirked.
“Sure as hell beats using a blowtorch.”
Now it was Robert’s turn to raise an eyebrow.
“Blowtorch?”
“It’s a long story.”
***
“Andrew Shaw wasn’t even a real doctor,” Dr. Mansfield said quietly. “He never finished his medical degree. But when he was first admitted here, I let him tag along. And for a while, everything was fine. To be honest, I think I was blinded by the fact that not only did I finally have some help in the ward from someone with at least some medical training, but, believe it or not, I liked him. You know, I wouldn’t go as far to say that Hell Week for the SEALS is the same as medical school, but there are similarities. I mean, you are pushed hard…very hard, often by some dickhead doctor who just wants to cut his own workload and has no interest in actually training someone. Anyways, I guess I felt a little of what he felt, knowing how stressed and the sheer brunt of anxiety way back when. I just felt sorry for him.” Dr. Mansfield took a deep breath before continuing. “Maybe that’s why I ignored the signs, or maybe he just hid them too well. God knows, he wouldn’t have been the first. Some of my patients…well, let’s just say that they can be very convincing. But inside, the personality that insists on being called Dr. Shaw, the one that we met here, had an obsession brewing. This too is not terribly uncommon for the recessive personality; they latch on to something—an idea, a notion, maybe—because they have little control over anything else. This usually doesn’t pose much of an issue, except in the rare cases in which the recessive personality actually gains dominance. Which is what happened with Andrew—with Dr. Shaw.”
The doctor paused as if remembering something specific, with Shelly, Cal, and Robert staring on.
“Dr. Shaw had this…this notebook, something that I…” He let his sentence trail off, then shook his head and composed himself. “He had this idea, see—this idea that split personalities weren’t just mental, weren’t just in his brain, but physical as well. As a child, he had undergone a lung transplant, and shortly thereafter he developed a split personality. There’s someone inside me, he used to say over and over again. He blames the lung donor, but it wasn’t that. The truth is, he was abused as a child, which is probably the trigger for his mental break—which, incidentally, was also the reason why he needed a lung transplant.”
Dr. Mansfield sighed.
“But that’s a story for another day…things were going fine, but then one day I lost my temper and pushed him too far. I should have remembered his case file, that the same sort of thing during his medical school that brought him here, to the Seventh Ward, got him kicked out of med school. Only, for whatever reason, when I pushed him in this place, Dr. Shaw came out. Maybe it was me, maybe it was the environment, or maybe it was just sheer bad luck. But for whatever reason, this time when Dr. Shaw came to the surface, he stayed.”
The doctor stopped speaking again, and Robert thought that that was the end of the story, which was probably fitting because they were running out of time.
“Dr. Mansfield, do you—?”
Shelly held up her hand, stopping him. There was just enough light from the hallway coming in through the window for him to make out the stern expression on her pretty face.
“What happened next?” she whispered, voice hoarse.
Dr. Mansfield took a long time to answer, time that Robert thought was better served figuring out a plan of how to deal with the quiddity.
“He took pieces of me…he took pieces of my body and sutured them to others, trying to prove his insane theory.”
“George,” Shelly whispered.
Dr. Mansfield nodded.
“It didn’t work…he was too aggressive, and I…I…I…”
He couldn’t get the words out, and Robert wished that he could soothe the man. But he couldn’t touch him—the last thing he wanted to do was go back to the horrible place with Leland Black and the flaming sky.
But then there was Amy. Leland had said she was okay, but…
Daddy, you promised…
“Please,” Robert said at last, his own voice sounding strained. “No need to keep going.”
Dr. Mansfield looked up at him, his eyes dark.
“But he didn’t stop there…he seduced others—got them to come here with the help of Justine, who saw something in him, I guess. She used to be my nurse, but she was unstable, easily persuaded, gullible. And Dr. Shaw hacked—Jesus—he hacked the bodies up, stitching them together, naming his gruesome creations after me. They…” His body suddenly hitched, and Robert raised an eyebrow.
Dr. Mansfield was crying, and this realization gave Robert pause; he had no idea that ghosts could cry.
“That’s who those other people are,” Cal said softly.
Robert turned to him.
“What other p
eople?”
Cal swallowed hard.
“In our cell…there were others, people with…with missing body parts, horribly disfigured people.”
Dr. Mansfield nodded.
“Dr. Shaw’s experiments.”
The word made the back of Robert’s leg twitch, but he resisted the urge to scratch.
An experiment…that’s what I am now, too.
A guttural cry suddenly filled the hallway, and while it was muted by the heavy door to the cell, there was an urgency to it that hadn’t been there before.
Robert swallowed hard, wondering what Dr. Shaw was doing to the man he called George…and what role the missing chunk of his calf was playing in it.
“We better hurry,” he said quickly. “Cal, you and Shelly go find Justine. She’s alive, that much I can confirm.”
Cal looked uncertain, but Dr. Mansfield’s nod seemed to convince him.
“Which is probably why Dr. Shaw is stuck here too—Justine keeps the narrative going. You guys deal with her. Dr. Mansfield and I will find Andrew Shaw and George and send them to the Marrow.”
Something crossed over Dr. Mansfield’s face when he said this, and Robert wondered, not for the first time, what the repercussions of bringing him back from the Marrow, from the clutches of the Goat, would be.
He made a mental note to ask Dr. Mansfield later, after this was all done.
“Robbo? Fuck, you sure? How—?”
Robert shook his head.
“I’m not sure, but—”
“We can just leave,” Shelly said softly. “Can just go crawl back out the window the way we came in, get the fuck out of here.”
It was Cal who answered.
“I won’t—can’t. Made a promise to those people—those quiddity—in the cell.”
Robert nodded.
“And Dr. Mansfield saved me.” He looked over at the man, whose pale cheeks were still moist from tears. “I won’t leave him here any longer.”
He stared at Shelly for a moment as she chewed on the inside of her cheek. Eventually, she nodded.
The Seventh Ward (The Haunted Book 2) Page 14
