In Darkness, Shadows Breathe

by Catherine Cavendish

  A woman sitting in a chair opposite nodded and smiled at her. Carol smiled back, then lowered her eyes. She wasn’t in the mood for conversation. That strange dream kept coming back into her mind and, try as she might, she couldn’t shake it off.

  * * *

  The next morning, two nurses helped her out of bed and she took tentative steps to the bathroom. The stitches pulled a bit, but the relief of not having that awful pain scything through her insides more than compensated for the discomfort.

  Breakfast arrived but she didn’t have much appetite for porridge and even the orange juice took some getting down. A sudden wave of nausea passed through her and she reached for the papier maché kidney dish someone had helpfully left on the bedside cabinet. She rang for the nurse and one arrived almost immediately.

  “It’s only to be expected following the kind of surgery you’ve had,” the young nurse said. “You probably won’t feel much like eating all day but tomorrow will be better.”

  A couple of hours later, a volunteer came round with a trolley of newspapers and magazines. Feeling a little less nauseous, Carol chose a tabloid paper and sat in her chair, reading it. She became aware of someone approaching and looked up. The woman from the bed opposite smiled down at her.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  Carol wanted to tell her she did mind actually but it would have sounded so rude. The woman only wanted to be friendly and she was wearing a scarf that concealed her scalp completely. She wheeled a piece of apparatus from which a bottle dripped clear liquid into a tube, extending down to a cannula in the back of her left hand.

  Carol shook her head, pasted a smile on her face. And the woman maneuvered a chair from the next bed. She sat and clasped her hands in her lap.

  “So, what are you in for?” she asked.

  “They took my appendix out yesterday.”

  The woman nodded. “I’m in the middle of chemo. Brain tumor. I couldn’t keep anything down so I’ve become severely dehydrated. They’re keeping me in for a couple of days.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry….” What did you say to a stranger with cancer?

  “Oh, don’t be. I shall be fine. One way or the other.”

  An awkward pause ensued. Carol wondered if she had committed some terrible social gaffe, but the woman seemed not to be offended.

  “I find people either try and wrap me up in cotton wool or pretend I’m invisible. It’s the Big C. Unless you’ve had it, it’s the last great taboo. If you talk about it, it’s like a death wish. Now I’ve got it, I find myself making terrible jokes about it with other people in the same situation. Here’s me. Terminal and still possessing a sense of humor.”

  “That must be…. I mean, it probably helps you deal with things.”

  “You’re right. It does. I’m Hester, by the way.”

  “Carol.”

  “I know.”

  How did she know?

  “It’s on the white board behind your head. You’re Carol Shaughnessy.”

  “Yes.” Carol felt tempted to add, Most of the time, but decided against it. Those strange experiences had been dreams or hallucinations caused by her diseased appendix. Now they had taken that out, she could go back to being herself again. If only she truly knew who that was.

  The woman’s face clouded over and for one instant, Carol wondered if she had read her thoughts, but Hester spoke again and her voice sounded pleasant and friendly. “Have you ever been in this hospital before?”

  Carol shook her head. “I haven’t been in any hospital before. Not that I know of anyway.”

  Hester leaned forward. “Then you won’t know about it.”

  “You mean its history? I know it used to be the workhouse and asylum.”

  “Yes, and the rest was the old Royal Hospital. It’s supposed to be haunted, by the spirits of some of the thousands of patients who passed through it over more than a century. There is even talk of a demon, a wandering spirit – I have heard it called the One and the Many – who takes over women’s bodies and can cause them to travel across time.”

  “The One and the Many?”

  “I know. It does sound a bit odd but it would seem that no one really knows its name, if it even possesses one. The One and the Many reflects its ability to move from one body and soul to another. Legend has it this female entity was cursed to wander the earth for eternity and must find a new host every human lifetime. She’s a demon of wrath too. So anytime any of her hosts has thoughts of revenge or anger, her presence in their minds will heighten their rage. This, in turn feeds her. I think it’s what they call a symbiotic relationship. Both parties benefit.”

  Carol wriggled, trying to get more comfortable. The conversation was taking a slightly odd turn and she hadn’t a clue about symbiotic relationships anyway. “Has anyone seen anything? Ghostly I mean.”

  “Oh yes. Plenty. It’s a very atmospheric place once you get past the newer parts. There are doors that lead down forgotten and neglected corridors. I’ll take you to one if you like.”

  Carol shivered. “Oh, I don’t think—”

  “Come on, Carol. It will be fun. More fun than sitting around here all day. Besides they’ll be at you to get on your feet and walk about. I’m certainly supposed to.”

  Hester was clearly not going to take ‘no’ for an answer. Somewhat reluctantly, Carol placed her half-read newspaper on the bed and stood carefully, supporting her abdomen with one hand and her back with the other as she straightened.

  “Ready?”

  Hester sounded impatient, almost as if she had an appointment to keep. Carol glossed over it in her mind and followed Hester out of the ward.

  At the Nurses’ station, Hester spoke to the Charge Nurse. “I’m taking Carol here for a walk. Get her circulation moving.”

  The male nurse smiled. “That’s fine. Not too far though. Remember, the distance you walk is the distance you have to come back.”

  “We’ll behave ourselves, don’t worry.”

  The Charge Nurse nodded and Hester and Carol moved off, down the corridor and out of the double doors.

  “Freedom at last.” Hester inhaled deeply. “Come on. It’s not far.” She wheeled her drip and Carol struggled to keep up as she strode down the corridor. At the end she turned left and within moments they had stopped in front of a door. It seemed strangely out of place. Older than the others, dark wood, with a Bakelite handle.

  “It’s through here.” Hester pushed open the door and a rush of cold, fusty air hit them.

  Instinctively, Carol covered her nose with her hand.

  Hester smiled. “You’ll soon get used to that. Come on.”

  The door swung shut behind them, closing with a slight but audible click. A long corridor with a low roof stretched ahead. The light was provided by flickering wall lamps in glass bowls. To her amazement Carol realized they were gas mantles. What the hell…?

  She followed Hester, staring at the walls as they moved steadily along. Old whitewash and paint had peeled in curls, some had dropped onto the floor, while the rest clung for dear life. It was impossible to make out any real color, but they could have been a pale buttermilk with a dark green, or maybe black, strip running lengthwise, halfway up the walls.

  The floor was filthy, littered not merely with the old paint, but dust and debris, the origins of which were impossible to determine. No one had been down here in years.

  “How can this place still be here?” Carol asked. Hester didn’t answer.

  Carol had been staring so hard at where they were going, she suddenly realized she hadn’t seen Hester in a few minutes. Surely she was in front of her. She wasn’t. “Hester? Hester, where are you?”

  She scanned all around her. There were no doors the woman could have slipped through. A wave of panic swept through Carol. “Hester? Don’t play games with me, please. It’s not funny.”
/>   Her voice echoed off the walls.

  A whooshing sound, moving toward her up the corridor. Getting louder by the second. It churned up dust and dirt, swirling it around until it hit Carol with the force of a mini tornado. She coughed and spluttered, her stitches pulling with the effort. The force flung her back against the filthy wall. And stopped.

  “Hester?” Carol spluttered. “For God’s sake. Where are you?”

  Behind her, the wall moved. She had been standing in front of a closed door without realizing it. It opened and she half fell into the room.

  “Miss Warren, come in. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  Chapter Four

  A male doctor in a white coat held a scalpel. Next to him, a woman dressed in severe black, her expression a hideous parody of a smile as if someone was stretching her lips wide, against her will. Someone pushed Carol farther inside the room. She stood petrified for a second, then started to scream.

  Strong arms grabbed her from behind, urging her forward. Where did they come from? Carol struggled, ignoring the pain from her protesting wound.

  A familiar voice spoke. “You’re next, Lydia. The other one simply wouldn’t do. This is meant to be.”

  Carol twisted her head around and saw Hester. No longer in her patient’s robe, she was dressed from head to foot in navy blue. This Hester had chestnut hair, parted in the center and tied behind her in a severe bun.

  Carol stopped screaming and struggling. “I don’t understand. What’s happening here?”

  The doctor nodded to the orderly who had pinioned her arms behind her. “Put her on the table and let’s get to work.”

  Much to her relief she noticed the doctor no longer brandished the scalpel. Her relief was short-lived. He unhooked a primitive rubber face mask from a gas tank and brought it toward her. She tossed her head from side to side, trying in vain to escape contact with what she knew would be a gas to put her to sleep.

  A sweet, sickly smell filled her nostrils. Blackness descended.

  Shadows moved, vague snippets of half-heard conversation. The smells of disinfectant, ammonia, other odors she couldn’t determine. Unwashed bodies. Armpits too close to her.

  No pain though. Definitely no pain….

  * * *

  “Carol? Carol. Are you awake? Dr. Sharma’s here to examine you.”

  Carol shook herself back to consciousness. She was in her bed at the Royal and Waverley. With no sign of the terrible corridor, or that awful room.

  The nurse moved to one side and Carol shot a quick glance across the room. Hester, in her patient’s robe and with the scarf once again wrapped around her head, sat opposite, calmly reading a book. She seemed to sense Carol looking at her and, briefly, their eyes met. Carol didn’t like the twist of the other woman’s lips. She knew. That had been no dream and Hester had been a fundamental part of it.

  “Good gracious,” the nurse said, picking up Carol’s slippers to tidy them away. “These have got dirty. Did you go outside in them?” She held them up. They were covered in muck.

  Carol shook her head. “I went for a walk with Hester. She took me through a door and down a really old, dilapidated corridor. The floor was filthy.”

  The nurse looked bemused. “Where was this? I can’t think of anywhere like that in this hospital.”

  “Not far away. Out of the ward and down the corridor, to the left and the door’s just there. It looks really old and….”

  The nurse was looking at her as if she had grown two heads. “There’s nowhere like that on this floor and I’m pretty sure there’s nowhere like it anywhere in this place.”

  “There must be. We went there. Hester’ll tell you.”

  “Who’s Hester?” the nurse asked.

  “The lady in that bed opposite.” But she was no longer there. “She’s probably gone to the bathroom. When she comes back I’ll get her to confirm what I’ve just said. Her slippers must be in the same state as mine. And she was wheeling her drip too.”

  Dr. Sharma joined them. The nurse – Allie by her name tag – spoke again. She was frowning. “Carol, there’s no one in that bed opposite. There’s no one called Hester on the ward.”

  “Problem?” Dr. Sharma looked from Allie to Carol and back again.

  “I’m not sure,” Carol said. “Apparently I’ve had some sort of hallucination. I went for a walk with someone who doesn’t exist to a place that isn’t there and my slippers got filthy in the process.”

  Dr. Sharma blinked. “Allie? Do you know what’s going on?”

  The nurse seemed about to speak, but shook her head and lowered her eyes.

  “Right,” Dr. Sharma said and smiled broadly at Carol. “Let’s not worry about that for the time being and have a look at you.”

  She examined Carol’s wound. “Take it easy for a few days when you move around, some of these stitches look as if they’ve been strained a little. They’re holding all right now, but we don’t want any of them bursting. Okay, that’s fine. If you could put a fresh dressing on please, Allie.”

  The nurse nodded. Dr. Sharma stood back and peeled off the latex gloves she had put on for the examination. She threw them into the bin.

  “I’d like to keep you in for another few days, but then I think we can look at discharging you. Is there anyone else living with you?”

  Carol shook her head. “I live on my own in a flat, but it’s on the ground floor so I don’t have to worry about stairs or anything like that.”

  “I’d like to keep an eye on you for a while longer until you’re able to manage by yourself. Meanwhile, try and keep out of trouble.” She touched Carol’s hand and winked at her.

  Carol forced a smile. Dr. Sharma moved on to her next patient and Allie accompanied her.

  Carol stared hard at the empty bed opposite.

  Who the hell are you, Hester, and why is it only I can see you?

  Chapter Five

  Allie noted down Carol’s temperature and wrapped the blood pressure cuff around her left arm.

  “There was a Hester Majors in for minor surgery about a month ago but she was discharged well before you arrived, and she wasn’t in that bed.”

  “The woman I’m talking about had a scarf round her head and said she was in because her chemo had made her so sick she needed fluids.”

  “We’ve had no patients with those symptoms for a couple of months. Certainly not on this ward anyway.”

  “Then I don’t understand this at all. I must have gone somewhere.” Carol suddenly remembered. “The Charge Nurse saw us. Hester spoke to him as we left the ward. He told us not to go too far because we would only have to walk the same distance back again.”

  “Did you get his name? Oh hang on. You said ‘he’. The Charge Nurse today is Sheila Pilkington. The only male Charge Nurse on this ward is Dennis and he’s on holiday in Tenerife.”

  “But I saw a male Charge Nurse.”

  “You’re sure he was a Charge Nurse?”

  “He was dressed in maroon scrubs. That’s what Charge Nurses wear here, isn’t it? I saw a color chart on the wall.”

  “Yes. Maroon for Charge Nurses.”

  Allie finished writing up Carol’s chart at the same moment the cleaner advanced toward her with a spray bottle of antibacterial cleaner.

  “Sorry I can’t be more help, Carol,” Allie said. She moved away.

  “Bet I can though,” the cleaner said quietly, smiling broadly and showing perfect teeth that gleamed white against her dark skin. She made sure Allie was out of earshot. “You’ve seen one of the ghosts that haunt this place and you’re not the first to see that particular one. Seen her myself.”

  “Surely she can’t be a ghost? I mean, she was as real as you and I. And then there was the Charge Nurse.”

  The woman polished Carol’s bed table and checked no one else was within earshot. “I
can’t speak for him. Maybe he’s real and maybe he isn’t, but the woman you’ve seen…. Cancer patient? Attached to a drip? Scarf around her head?”

  That pretty much summed her up. Carol nodded.

  “I’ll bet she took you through an old door into an even older corridor with flickering lights and peeling walls.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because she took me too, only I caught on right away that there was something unnatural about it, turned tail and ran out of there. Never saw the woman again, even though I had been talking to her right over there.” She pointed to the bed opposite. “That very morning. When I got back on the ward and asked where Hester was, no one had heard of her. Just like now. I told my supervisor and she said she’d heard the same story, or different versions of it, from patients and staff going back all the time she had been here. At least one patient said she went down that corridor as herself but seemed to become someone else while she was there. It was as if someone from a time back in history was sharing her body.”

  “Possession? I thought that was only in books and films.” Although it would explain so much about my life.

  “Oh no. It’s real enough. One of my grandmothers came from Haiti and she told me many times of seeing people who had risen from the dead. Zombies. And of people she knew who had become possessed by the spirits of the restless ones. They’re real, all right. I just never expected to find them here.”

  Another, older, woman in a cleaner’s uniform beckoned to her from the door. “Got to go. Lucille’s on the warpath. Take my advice, don’t have anything to do with that woman if she comes back.”

  “Thanks. I won’t.”

  Carol leaned back on her pillows. First all that at home and now here. What was going on? Could the two things be linked? After all, Waverley Court had been built on land forming part of the hospital and the workhouse. Maybe she was being targeted by the spirits that had once lived here.

  Her eyes grew heavy and she drifted off to sleep. The sounds of the ward faded into the background and she dreamed.

  * * *