In Darkness, Shadows Breathe

by Catherine Cavendish

  Dried – or in the case of my nether regions, well blotted – I changed into a clean nightie, relishing the sensation of being cleansed and sweet-scented. After ten days with a catheter I didn’t think I would ever take such personal freshness for granted again.

  Returning to my bed, something caught my eye. The poem. Lying on the bed. I was sure it hadn’t been there when I went for my shower but now, here it was.

  And something had changed.

  Someone had written on it. Scrawled more like. Not the neat handwriting of the original. I deciphered the almost illegible scribble and my blood chilled.

  ‘You’re next.’

  I threw the paper down as if it had burned my fingers. Hastily I opened the top drawer of the bedside cabinet and tossed it in there. I slammed the drawer shut, my heart pounding and my breath coming in short gasps. I grabbed my dressing gown off the chair and wrapped it around me before tugging the door open and stepping out into the corridor, grateful for the chatter and sounds of patients and nursing staff going about their normal daily business.

  “Off for a walk?” Joyce said. “You’ll miss your cup of tea.”

  “I’m just going to the end of the ward and back.”

  “Good idea.” She went into the next side room.

  I felt someone close up behind and turned my head. No one within six feet of me. Then why was it I could feel breathing on my neck? Why had the clean, antiseptic smell of the ward been replaced by a stench of unwashed human skin that couldn’t be emanating from me?

  A strong smell of halitosis preceded the familiar, unpleasant, female whisper. “I told you. You’re next. Don’t forget. She’s coming for you.”

  I stopped. Paralyzed with fear.

  “Are you okay?” Margie paused in the act of mopping the floor.

  I improvised. “Sorry. Yes. I just remembered something.”

  She carried on with her work. I turned and made my labored way back to my room. Down the corridor, the tea trolley rattled closer. I reached my door and turned the handle.

  Something skittered out of sight.

  But on the bed, the disfigured poem was back.

  * * *

  “I agree. This is strange.” Paul handed the sheet of paper back to me. “If I didn’t know better…if this wasn’t a hospital, where they generally take things seriously, I would swear someone was playing a game with you. Have you spoken to Joyce or one of the other nurses about it?”

  “Not yet. Do you think I should?”

  “Definitely. If it’s a prank, it’s most likely one of the student nurses and they need to be put right straightaway.”

  “I’ll talk to Joyce later.”

  “Or I can, if you like?”

  “No, it’s okay, I’ll do it.”

  “I’d chuck it away after that if I was you. Or give it to Joyce as evidence. I mean it’s hardly Shakespeare, is it? The poem I mean.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It has a certain charm.”

  “Goodness alone knows who the poet is. Couldn’t find anything about her on the internet and I really searched.”

  That nagging doubt that wouldn’t go away tackled me again. “I saw something odd today too. As I came back to my room, a figure raced out of my line of vision.”

  “What was it like?”

  “It was too brief a glimpse to tell, but I did think it was human. Small, thin. That’s all I can say and I’m not even sure that’s entirely accurate.”

  “It couldn’t be a hallucination caused by the painkillers, could it? I know morphine is supposed to induce vivid dreams.”

  “Surely not in the form I’m taking it, and the doses are strictly controlled. I’m down to just one in the morning and one at night.”

  “What about the other stuff?”

  I shook my head. “Co-codamol is only codeine and paracetamol. Nothing hallucinogenic about that.”

  “Then we’re left with the conclusion that you really did see something today and maybe on one or two other occasions as well. Unless you were sleepwalking when you returned to this room?”

  Somehow the realization that Paul was apparently prepared to give credence to what I was now certain I had seen with my own eyes came as a mixed blessing. Relief, certainly, that he believed me, but also fear because if he believed it had happened, then I really did have something to worry about, apart from the obvious challenges of my medical condition.

  * * *

  My sleep was disturbed that night. Every time I dropped off, swirling images of creatures half concealed by shadow taunted me, reaching out tantalizingly close and then withdrawing right at the moment I was sure they would grab me.

  Eventually I gave up the effort and hauled myself out of bed for a visit to the bathroom, instantly aware of the chill in the room. Strange because, if anything, the room was usually a little too warm.

  When I emerged a few minutes later. I heard a sound coming from the corridor. A knock, followed by a thump. I opened my door and peered out. The corridor was deserted, the lights dimmed as always at this time. I glanced at my watch. Three forty-five. I stood listening.

  Thump.

  As clear as it could possibly be and it had come from somewhere inside the wall opposite. The wall where the impossible door had been.

  The wall where the door, once again, appeared.

  My mouth ran dry. I put out my hand and clasped the antique round doorknob. As before, it was dark brown, made of Bakelite, the sort of doorknob that had been on my grandmother’s front door all those years ago in Halifax. It felt smooth under my fingers. I turned it. It moved slickly and the door opened without a sound. A rush of cold, dank air made me shiver and I pulled my dressing gown tighter around me.

  I stepped over the threshold onto the old linoleum, noting the flaking paint of the walls and ceiling and the flickering gas mantles along the walls which cast an eerie, uneven glow. All seemed still. My breathing sounded loud in contrast to the silence all around me. Silence so complete it was tangible. It was too quiet.

  My heart thumping, I took one uncertain step after another, all the while my brain screaming at me to turn and go back to the safety of my room. But I had to keep on. I had to know what was in here.

  A woman moaned, shattering the stillness. I caught my breath.

  It came again. A long, low keening of someone in abject despair. I stopped next to the source of the sound. Another door. I put my hand out to turn the handle and opened it.

  I peered inside. A smell of disinfectant and something unpleasant. Something like urine. Slightly fishy.

  A loud moan. Right in my ear. I cried out. The noise of people bustling around grew from a murmur into a clamor. I turned back from the room to see the corridor milling with semi-transparent figures, all in Victorian dress. Women in long white uniforms with starched aprons, wearing identical and quite elaborate white cotton bonnets, strode purposefully along, ignoring my existence. An old woman, her hair in an unkempt bun, hobbled toward me. She was dressed in an ankle-length smock over an old, much-mended dress. Behind her, three more women of indeterminate age, similarly attired. None paid me any attention as they moved past. I could hear their footsteps but their bodies were ethereal. The woman I had seen on my earlier visit to this corridor drifted past me, this time dressed like all the others, her expression blank and hopeless.

  I stood in the doorway, seemingly unable to move, riveted by the spectacle playing out in front of me. As if a projectionist had hit a fast forward button, the scene sped up, slowly at first then faster and faster as the figures raced back and forth until they became a blur.

  Out of nowhere, a solitary figure emerged, more tangible than the rest, moving at normal speed through the speeding apparitions. A woman. Maybe my age or perhaps younger – and I read something in her eyes I had seen in no other.

  She could see me.

 
Her eyes were cold, gray, staring at me. Almost through me. Her gaze sent shivers through me.

  “You’re the one, aren’t you?” I said. “You wrote that message on the poem.”

  She stopped in front of me and said nothing. She stared at me. Unblinking, unwavering.

  I noted she wasn’t dressed like the others. Already I knew who they must be. I had stepped through some kind of portal back into the old workhouse. The women in the dresses, aprons and bonnets were staff and the other inmates. None of the women I had seen looked quite like this one though. She appeared the same, although her body was much less transparent, her dress was black and her hair severely dressed in a bun. I felt if I reached out and touched her I would feel a living person beneath my fingers. She did not belong in a workhouse. And she certainly didn’t belong here.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  Still she didn’t speak. Now we were alone in that strange place and she began to fade until she disappeared. I glanced over my shoulder, but the door that had been open was now shut. I looked for the handle but it had vanished.

  I should have been terrified but, for some reason, I felt calm. My need to find answers overwhelmed my trepidation and fear. The corridor to my left grew dim. To my right, back where I had come from, the gas mantles continued to flicker as before. I had to get back to my room. But who was the woman and why was this happening to me?

  Retracing my steps, hoping and praying I would be able to get out of there, I was within inches of the closed door when it slowly swung open, revealing the welcoming sight of the Gynecology ward corridor. I raced through it and immediately looked back over my shoulder. The door had gone.

  * * *

  Margie was in a talkative mood later that afternoon. She chattered to me about her son and his latest girlfriend, her plans for Christmas, and I was happy to listen. She was a good storyteller with a keen sense of humor.

  “There’ll be twelve of us for Christmas dinner. Twelve! We’ve only got six chairs. They’ll have to be fed in shifts. I’d better be more careful about the turkey this year as well. Last year I got such a big ’un I had to chop its legs off to get it in the oven….”

  She had just finished the bathroom and was starting on my floor when I decided the time was right. “Do you believe in ghosts, Margie?”

  Margie paused, and leaned on her mop. “Well, let’s say I don’t not believe in them, if that makes sense. Like I said to you a few days ago, I have heard some strange stories about this place and some more than once. Like the little girl I told you about.”

  “Agnes.”

  “Yes.” She wrung her mop out in the bucket.

  “Have you heard anyone say they found a door in the wall outside here? A door that was only there now and again?” She hadn’t responded last time I had tried to raise this subject and I wondered how she would react. Last time, she had simply changed the subject, but this time she would have to really ignore it, or else answer me.

  “Once. A long time ago.” Why did she look so uncomfortable talking about this? All her earlier humor and good spirits seemed to have evaporated.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I hadn’t worked here long and a woman came in. She was really sick. Cancer. She didn’t have long. They put her in this very room and she was drugged up on goodness knows what, so she used to ramble a bit. Sometimes she would get up, although how she managed it no one could imagine. The cancer had spread all through her body by then and usually she couldn’t walk at all, but somehow she would get herself out into the corridor and they would find her, always in the same place, slumped against the wall opposite. She said there was a door and she had gone through it and found herself in the old workhouse. She saw all these people from, like, a century or more ago. I found her once and she said the same to me. It actually scared me. Mind you, I was a lot younger and more impressionable then.

  “I helped the nurses put her back to bed. She couldn’t get there by herself even though she’d managed to get herself out there. I remember, we settled her down and tucked her in and she stared straight at me. Then she said something really weird. I have never forgotten it because it didn’t make any real sense, but she said it with such conviction….” Margie shook herself as if trying to rid herself of something unpleasant and unnerving.

  “What was it? What did she say?”

  Margie hesitated. “She said, ‘In darkness, shadows breathe.’”

  Chapter Twelve

  “The same as the title of that poem,” I said to Paul as he sat next to my bed that evening.

  He said nothing for a few moments, before inhaling deeply. “You’ve certainly had a busy day,” he said at last. “I haven’t been idle either. I’ve been doing some research and I think I’ve located a history of the workhouse. I had a chat with that friend of yours, Joanna, at the university and she recommended it, so I’ve ordered it online and it should arrive within a few days. Judging by the preview, there’s a blueprint of the layout of the building so we may be able to work out where it lay in relation to this hospital.”

  “No more joy on Lydia Warren Carmody?”

  Paul shook his head.

  “I can’t help thinking she’s tied into this in some way,” I said. “Maybe she’s the one I saw today.”

  “You seem incredibly calm for someone who’s had the sort of encounter you’ve had.”

  “I’ve just had major cancer surgery. You get a different perspective.”

  Paul looked as if he didn’t know whether to believe me. In truth I had surprised myself. I had always thought I would run away screaming if anything remotely supernatural came my way but then, I had experienced many a sleepless night when I was a child, worrying about getting cancer. I couldn’t imagine myself ever being able to cope with that, yet here we were.

  * * *

  Maryam’s smile was not quite as broad as it had been last time I had seen her, and a pang of fear curled in the pit of my stomach.

  “How are you feeling today?” she asked as I assumed the now-familiar position for an examination of my wounds. A gentle series of prods between my legs followed and her smile grew brighter. The ball of fear settled into a corner and went back to sleep.

  “I’m feeling fine,” I said.

  “Everything looks well down there,” she said, peeling off her surgical gloves and throwing them in the waste bin. The metal lid slammed shut as she released her foot on the pedal.

  Joyce stood by.

  Maryam gave a light cough. “Your blood pressure has been a little erratic for a couple of days. Mostly at night and first thing in the morning. The rest of the day is fine. We’ll keep monitoring you regularly and it’s nothing to worry about at this stage, but is there anything you are doing in the evenings that you are doing differently to any other time of day, apart from sleeping, of course?”

  There was only one thing I could think of. I swallowed. “I’ve had some strange experiences.”

  She looked at me questioningly. I had to continue now I’d started. “In the early hours of this morning for example, I couldn’t sleep and I heard a noise outside my door….” I carried on with my strange tale while Maryam and the nurse exchanged glances but said nothing.

  When I had finished, Maryam spoke. “That’s quite some story and yes, your BP was up this morning.” She thought for a moment. “I think I would like you to have another MRI. I know you’ve had a couple of these recently but I just want to rule anything out that could be the cause.”

  I looked from one to the other. Their faces gave nothing away, but…. “You think I’m imagining this, don’t you? I can understand it. I know this must sound crazy but I also know it happened and that I’m not the only one in this hospital that’s ever experienced the same things I’m now experiencing.”

  “Who told you that?” Maryam glanced at Joyce, who shook her head.

  “
I don’t want to get anyone into trouble so I would rather not say,” I said.

  “Probably Margie. The cleaner,” Joyce said. “She does like to chat about the ghost stories patients have told her. I keep telling her she shouldn’t because most of the time they’re probably induced by the morphine they’re on.”

  “But not in my case,” I said. “I’ve only been on Oramorph and not even as much as I used to take.”

  “It’s still morphine,” Maryam said. “And Joyce is right. It can cause distressing dreams.”

  “These aren’t dreams,” I said, desperate to keep my temper under control. Nothing I hated more than being disbelieved. “You know when you’re awake and when you’re dreaming. It’s two different things altogether.”

  Joyce piped up. “Not necessarily. I have known patients on morphine who have sworn they’ve been out of bed and running up and down the corridor when, in actual fact, they’ve been fast asleep the whole time.”

  I shook my head. “Not in my case. I promise you.”

  “Nevertheless,” Maryam said, “let’s get that MRI done, just to be on the safe side.”

  “Fine with me,” I said, trying not to feel irritated.

  “We should be able to squeeze you in tomorrow, all being well.”

  They left shortly after, leaving me unhappy and annoyed. Why wouldn’t they even entertain the possibility that all wasn’t normal in this hospital? That somehow, for some unknown reason, a portal opened up between the world of the present and the world of the past? I was sure it would happen again before long and, when it did, I would once again venture down that corridor.

  Only, this time, I would bring something back with me.

  * * *

  “We’ve managed to get you in right now.” Joyce handed me my dressing gown and waited as I put it on.