The Psyching
A Short Story by Freida McFadden
The Psyching: A Short Story
© 2015 by Freida McFadden. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without express written permission from the author
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, incidents and places are the products of the authors’ imagination, and are not to be construed as real. None of the characters in the book is based on an actual person. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
“The Psyching” was first published in 11 out of 10, edited by Freida McFadden.
Tonight I am the medical student on call on our locked psychiatry unit at Overlook Hospital. That would be bad enough in itself. I mean, being locked up for 24 hours with a bunch of crazy people is not my idea of a good time.
But there’s something much worse going on tonight.
I’m not a superstitious person. I don’t believe in black cats, broken mirrors, or rabbits’ feet. Well, I believe all those things exist, obviously, but not that they’re associated with any sort of luck in one way or another. But it’s hard not to get a little bit creeped out about tonight.
Exactly ten years ago tonight, two medical students were on call with a psychiatry resident, just like tonight. The unit was locked, just like tonight. And in the morning, the janitor came in to clean the resident room and it was discovered that the resident had hacked to death the two medical students, then killed himself.
Here’s to hoping history doesn’t repeat itself.
3:30 p.m.:
“Are you excited about tonight?”
It’s irritating how amused our resident Jack seems about the entire thing. He has literally been talking about tonight nonstop for a week. I think he’s looking forward to it.
“Sure,” I mumble, mostly because I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that I’m creeped out.
“You know,” Jack says, “enthusiasm makes up about half your grade…”
I just glare at him.
“Don’t worry,” Jack says. “I won’t let anybody murder you.”
I fold my arms across my chest. “You know that 10 years ago, the resident was the one who killed everyone.”
“Right,” Jack says. “You didn’t let me finish. I was going to say that I won’t let anyone murder you besides me.”
He’s hilarious. Absolutely hilarious.
“Who are you on call with tonight?”
“Danielle Gerard.”
“You and Danni, huh?” Jack smirks to himself. “The two of you are going to be together all night long? That is adorable.”
He acts like we’re going to spend the night making out or something.
“Don’t worry,” he says again. “I would definitely kill Danni before I would kill you.”
I don’t doubt that’s true. I’m pretty sure almost every resident has wanted to kill Danni Gerard at some point.
Jack chuckles to himself. “Come on, Wendy, you’re not seriously worried, are you? I mean, that resident 10 years ago had a lot of serious issues. I’m totally normal though.”
I raise my eyebrows at him. “Are you?”
Jack Lawson has been my resident for two whole weeks. I don’t know if I would describe him as normal, but I probably wouldn’t characterize him as homicidal either. Or even psychopathic. I would mostly say that he needs a haircut and a shave—his brown hair is just a little bit too shaggy to be professional, and he sports a 5 o’clock shadow every day until the midafternoon, when it becomes a full-on beard. His green scrubs are really wrinkled, even for scrubs.
“Totally normal,” he assures me.
“Don’t people go into psychiatry as a way of dealing with their own psychiatric issues?”
“Some people,” he admits. “But a lot of us do it because it’s an easy residency and we’re totally lazy.”
“And you’re lazy?”
“God, yes,” he says. “Have you learned nothing in the last two weeks?”
I guess he’s right. He does seem incredibly lazy.
“Anyway,” Jack says, “I’m hoping this is going to be a quiet call. Be warned that if things get really quiet I may disappear to go work on my novel.”
I stare at him. “You’re writing a novel?”
Jack nods. “When it becomes a bestseller, I can quit medicine and live off the profits.”
“Good luck with that.”
4:15 p.m.:
“I’m scared, Wendy.”
Danni is staring at me with her big brown doe eyes. I start feeling irritated. There are 45 minutes before our call officially begins, and I’m already panicked enough without having to comfort Danni.
“There’s nothing to be scared of,” I tell her. I avert my eyes because Danni’s short white coat is so clean and white that it’s giving me a headache. “Jack isn’t going to murder us.”
“He might,” she says.
“He won’t.”
“I never told you this before,” she says, “but I’m actually really psychic about things.”
Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.
She reaches out and grabs my arm with her skinny little fingers. “I just have this feeling that something terrible is going to happen tonight. Just like 10 years ago.”
Danni blinks her big eyes at me again. She’d actually be really pretty if she weren’t so annoying. Annoyingness always overshadows prettiness.
“Nothing is going to happen,” I say firmly.
“Dr. Sadler is worried too,” Danni tells me.
I can’t help but frown. Dr. Sadler is our attending physician, a middle-aged man with a big doughy face and receding hairline who rarely cracks a smile, much less a joke during our morning rounds. He seems like an eminently practical person, not someone likely to believe in dumb superstition.
“He told you he’s worried?”
Danni nods solemnly. “Yes. He did.” She lowers her voice a few notches. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but Dr. Sadler and I actually share a psychic connection.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It’s true,” Danni assures me. “He says he doesn’t have this type of connection with anyone else, even his wife.”
I cringe. “Oh, Danni…”
“Anyway,” she goes on, “he said that if we feel in danger at any point, even a little bit, I should text him and he’ll come right over to save us.”
“Very reassuring.”
Danni beams at me. “I thought so too.”
It just occurred to me: Dr. Sadler must’ve given Danni his cell phone number. I can’t even begin to deal with that one.
5:00 p.m.:
Lockdown.
The psychiatric ward at our hospital is arranged in a circle. If you start at the entrance and keep walking, you will eventually end up where you started. (This comes in handy if you are a psychiatric patient who wants to go around in circles the entire day.) There’s only one entrance/exit to the ward, and it is now locked. With a key. A key that only Jack and one nurse have in their possession.
“Okay, guys,” Jack says to me and Danni. “Why don’t you two hang out at the nurses station? You can read if you’d like. Just give me a page if you need me.”
“Can we call loved ones to tell them goodbye?” Danni asks him.
“Absolutely!”
Jack starts to walk away chuckling, but then he stops midway down the hall. He turns around, looking thoughtful.
“By the way,” he said, “whatever you do, don’t go in Room 237.”
I stare at him. “What’s
in Room 237?”
“Don’t worry yourself about that,” he says quickly. “Just don’t go in there. Okay?”
“Okay!” Danni says cheerfully.
As Jack walks down the hallway, I turn to Danni and whisper, “Don’t you think that was weird?”
“What was weird?”
“That there’s some room that we’re not supposed to go inside. Don’t you think that seems suspicious?”
Danni’s eyebrows shoot up. “Do you want me to text Dr. Sadler?”
I see her reaching for her phone, so I quickly say, “No.” God, no.
A patient that I know only as “Johnny” stumbles down the hall at that moment. Johnny is a big guy, with a moon face and a gray sweat suit, and drool perpetually in the corner of his mouth. He walks towards us, his gray socks padding against the floor. He stops right in front of us.
“Lick,” Johnny says to us, as spittle flies out of his mouth.
He watches us for a moment, waiting for our response, which is obviously complete horror and disgust. Then he turns away from us and continues on his circle around the unit.
This is going to be a long night.
6:30 p.m.:
“This isn’t good.”
My stomach flips slightly as I hear a nurse named Sally mumbling into a phone. While those are definitely the words you least want to hear during, say, a brain surgery in which you’re the patient, you also don’t want to hear it when you’re locked on a psychiatric ward for the night with a bunch of crazy people.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her.
Sally gives me the same look she would give a fly that was buzzing in her face. It’s a special look that seems to be reserved for us medical students. The lines on Sally’s narrow face tell me she’s been a nurse long enough to have perfected that look. “The phone lines seem to be down.”
I stare at her. “That’s not good.”
“No kidding.”
“We’re on a locked unit,” I say nervously. “Isn’t it dangerous if the phone lines are down?”
Sally looks at me for a minute, then her face breaks out in a smile. “Oh right, you’re worried about being murdered tonight!”
And then she wanders away, chuckling to herself.
7:45 p.m.:
The psychiatric unit has one room that is reserved for the residents to use, basically as a hang out. There’s a couch and a computer, and a few chairs, but not much else. Nothing fun, like a foosball table. I head over to the resident room, and find that the door is shut, but not locked. I open the door and discover Jack sitting inside, working at the computer. He seems to have Microsoft Word open, but quickly minimizes the window when I come into the room.
“Mrs. Klein has a headache,” I tell him.
“Mrs. Klein is a headache,” he says. Which is mean but also kind of true.
“What are you working on?” I ask, nodding at the computer.
“My novel.”
He was actually serious about that. He really is writing a novel. “Can I read it?”
“Nobody reads it until it’s finished,” he says rather solemnly.
I shrug. “Okay.”
“By the way,” he says, “you didn’t go into Room 237, did you?”
I get butterflies in my stomach at the way Jack is studying my face. Why does he keep asking me about the room? I almost forgot about it until he brought it up. Now it’s going to drive me crazy again. “No.”
“Good.” He stands up. “Let’s go see Mrs. Klein.”
8:10 p.m.:
I’m standing in the hallway when I hear footsteps behind me.
“Lick,” someone hisses in my ear.
I turn my head just in time to see Johnny walking away.
8:30 p.m.:
I walk by Room 237.
The door is closed. I don’t hear anything going on inside. Nothing suspicious. Nobody being murdered in there.
I want more than anything to see what’s going on in that room. This is going to drive me freaking crazy, isn’t it?
8:40 p.m.:
“So it turns out,” Jack says, “they shut off the phone lines because several of our patients were calling 911 with bomb threats.”
“Why were they doing that?” I ask.
“Because they’re psychiatric patients,” Jack says like I’m an idiot.
“Well, when will the phones start working again?”
“Right after I kill you and Danni,” he says.
Sigh.
9:15 p.m.:
Sally tells me that our youngest patient, Mike, wants to talk to a doctor. She supposes that I will do.
Mike is 19 years old. If you watch enough movies and TV, you forget how young an actual 19 year old really looks, since most teenagers are played by 30 year olds. He looks maybe 12 years old. A real 12 year old would probably look like a kindergartner to me. And a kindergartner would probably look like a fetus.
Mike doesn’t seem particularly thrilled by my arrival. He hasn’t shown much in the way of emotion since he came here. He was brought in by his parents and is being evaluated for his first schizophrenic break.
“What’s going on?” I ask him, in my “cool voice” reserved for younger patients.
Mike points to the earring going through his left eyebrow. “I think I have an infection, Doc.”
He calls me “Doc,” despite the fact that I’m not a doctor, and am only five years older than he is. But at least I don’t have earrings in my face and my hair isn’t dyed jet black like his.
I examine the gold hoop jabbed through Mike’s eyebrow, all the while making knowledgeable sounds. I can tell he’s pretending not to seem worried. Our attending physicians seem to think that Mike is having his first schizophrenic break. But we medical students are all privately convinced that his only problem is that he’s gay and can’t deal with it or tell his parents.
Not that that isn’t a serious problem. But I don’t think it’s a reason to be hospitalized on an inpatient psychiatric unit. And I definitely don’t think it’s going to respond to dopamine antagonists.
“Let me go talk to Dr. Lawson about this,” I tell Mike.
I go find Jack, and describe Mike’s inflamed eyebrow to him. He doesn’t have much interest in seeing the eyebrow in question. He just shrugs and says, “I don’t know, put some bacitracin on it.”
Jack is really working hard tonight to prove his point that he is more lazy than crazy.
10:45 p.m.:
I hear a scream.
I’m sitting at the nurses’ station, in the very center of the circle that makes up the psychiatric unit, which somehow seems like the safest place to be. I’m playing fruit ninja on my phone. It makes me feel like I’m honing my fighting skills.
At the sound of the scream, I go running. And I actually go running in the direction of the scream, believe it or not. I can’t help but notice that I am headed in the direction of Room 237. I knew it! I knew there was something going on with that room…
Danni is standing in the hallway, screaming her head off. In front of her, there is a set of twins standing there in matching hospital gowns. They both have brown hair clipped behind their ears with barrettes, and are staring at Danni calmly as she continues shrieking.
I put my hand on Danni’s shoulder to calm her down, but I have to admit, the twins are pretty freaky. They just keep standing there, holding hands.
“For God sake, what’s going on here?” Sally comes up behind us, huffing and puffing. “Is someone dying over here?”
Danni points a shaky finger in the direction of the two women.
Sally looks at them. “Anna, Jenny, go to bed.” The two women plod off in separate directions. I noticed that neither of them goes into Room 237, which is still closed. When the women are gone, Sally looks back at us and shakes her head. “What was all that screaming about?”
“They looked like ghosts or something,” I say, now feeling a little sheepish about the whole thing. Okay, a lot sheepish.
&
nbsp; “They’re sisters,” Sally says. “They both have schizophrenia.”
“I know,” Danni says. “Anna is my patient.”
I stare at her, suppressing the sudden urge to shake her. “Then why were you screaming?”
Danni shrugs. “Twins scare me. I think it’s a psychic thing.”
Sometimes I think Danni is the one who should be a patient here.
I’m about to remark something to that effect, when Johnny walks past us and says in a loud voice: “Lick.”
I wipe off the fleck of his saliva that landed on my forehead.
11:15 p.m.:
Sally told me that a patient named Mr. McGregor wanted to speak to me. We actually all call Mr. McGregor “Spiderman,” because he’s schizophrenic and thinks he’s Spiderman. It’s actually sort of funny in a disturbing sort of way. Especially because he looks so ordinary. Although, in his defense, Peter Parker looked pretty ordinary.
“What’s wrong, Mr. McGregor?” I ask him.
“My webs aren’t working,” Spiderman says in his flat monotone. He always speaks that way, like a robot come to life. Apparently, it’s not uncommon in schizophrenia.
Mr. McGregor thinks that webs shoot out of his wrists, which would be completely accurate if he were actually Spiderman. (He’s not Spiderman.)
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say.
Spiderman holds his wrists out, and says, “Go web.” He looks back up at me. “See? Nothing.”
I’m not sure what to do to fix Spiderman’s defective imaginary web shooting mechanism. More Haldol? “Do you think a Band-Aid would help?” I suggest.
Spiderman thinks for a minute. “It might.”
God, I love it when patients ask for something I can actually get for them.
I head over to the supply closet. I find a Band-Aid, then I take an extra one, just in case he needs one for each wrist. Then I open the door to leave, but it doesn’t turn.
I stare at the doorknob for a second, baffled. I grip the knob with all my strength, and try to wrench it clockwise. It doesn’t budge. Not even a centimeter.
It’s locked.
The Psyching: A Short Thriller Page 1
