13 Hauntings

by Clarice Black

  Something abrupt happened at that instant which would make her reconsider her scepticism for such seemingly danse macabre trinkets.

  The planchette shot from her hand, without any external force being applied on it, and jutted on the board at a perpendicular angle, as if it was being held by invisible hands.

  She watched it, frozen to her seat in horror, not sure if this was an alcoholic hallucination, as it moved across the board spelling out a word.

  M.

  U.

  N.

  G.

  O.

  Carrie abruptly stood up, ashen faced, and slammed into the wall behind her, unable to comprehend this bizarreness she had just witnessed. The planchette had moved on its own, and it was not just her imagining it. She had only had one beer in the past few hours—certainly not hallucinogenic enough to make her see what she did. She was not drunk.

  The planchette moved again, this time hovering above the board menacingly and then shooting at the number 6. It stuck there like a dart and fidgeted wildly.

  A scream was building up in her throat. Her lips, however, had a different thing in mind. They pursed tightly, suffocating the scream to die down from where it had arisen; cold sweat dripped down her face; her eyes filled with fearful tears at the observance of such paranormality.

  Bang!

  The door opened and in came Gilbert, assisted by Rachel who held his arms in a vice from behind. She pushed him in the room roughly, and left with the door still open.

  He was dazed from the sedation and the words that he spoke came out slurred, but his eyes were sharp and, as he walked towards Carrie and her desk, slowly staring at the fidgeting pointer on the Ouija board, he smiled.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

  Deep Magic

  “What’s the matter, dearie? Cat got your tongue?” Gilbert spoke in a tone which completely contradicted his previous dialect. He was talking sanely, slowly. He was talking in the voice of a credible man.

  Carrie, on the other hand, was quite fitful, and every time she opened her mouth to say something, she found no words leaving, only a hollow drawl belonging to a harrowed woman. She stared at the board, then at the planchette, and then at Gilbert, who sat in front of her with a serious face. No sneers, no smirks. No insanity.

  “I saw… this thing move!” Carrie ejaculated.

  “I know. I told you, didn’t I? Earlier today? I figured in my room that it worked only at nights. Such as now,” Gilbert said and took the planchette out of the board. It zapped from his hand and flew back to the board.

  “Now watch,” Gilbert said, focusing his gaze on the pointer. Carrie looked at it too. It danced around the board on its own, spelling out incoherencies. It jotted from one end to the other and then to the numbers and then fell limp.

  “I’m afraid I’m losing my mind,” Carrie said.

  “Oh, you aren’t. And I’m not crazy,” Gilbert said and arched back in his chair.

  “That I’m not too sure about,” she replied.

  “Still pensive? Well, don’t be. I’m going to show you what this all means since telling it is not going to make you believe,” Gilbert said and at once stood up from his chair, sending it toppling back with the vigour of a man who hadn’t been sedated. The clatter of the chair brought Rachel back in the room. She stared at Gilbert offensively and then at Carrie.

  “It’s all right. Nothing’s the matter, nurse,” Carrie said. Rachel lingered for a moment longer, eyeing them both with suspicion, then left, leaving the door open.

  “Now,” whispered Gilbert for fear of being overheard, “there’s this thing I have to show you. But you should believe in me. I’m not crazy nor am I harbouring delusions. I came here, in this hospital, with a purpose. A purpose I am going to see fulfilled.”

  “What purpose?”

  “There’s evil within, evil resident beneath this hospital. Old magic, deep magic. Wickedness brewing…” Gilbert whispered. The planchette jittered.

  “Enough with the suspense already! Tell it to me straight!” Carrie found her frustration, despite all the fear, surging back into her. Gilbert was playing her for a fool, nothing else.

  “I am not playing you for a fool. But know this, the information that I have, if I tell it to you all at once, I’m afraid will make you bonkers,” he said. “Come with me to my room.”

  “Are you seriously offering me a booty call right now?” she scoffed.

  “You’re not my type, woman. I don’t date self-righteous blondes. Besides, you’re too young and skinny,” he said and waited for her to stand up and follow him.

  She sat still.

  “I only came here to apologize for punching you. Nothing else. I’m sorry I did that. Now can you please stop fucking with my mind?” she said.

  “It’s all right. I don’t give two shits about that lame jab you call a punch. My purpose here’s bigger than such pettiness. Now, will you come with me or do you need more convincing?” he said with impatience leaking from his eyes and his quivering lips.

  “Convince me more,” Carrie said.

  “Fine! We’re wasting precious time! But fine!” he said and grabbed the toppled chair, set it straight, and sat down on it.

  “You have been in London for how long now?” he asked.

  “A little less than a year.”

  “And this is your first job as a clinical psychologist, am I correct?”

  “Correct. But what’s your point?”

  “You got no jobs anywhere else in the entire country, despite having sent your resume everywhere. Only this place. And you thought you’d struck gold. You were going to become a big city girl, working at a big city hospital. In your excitement, I think you didn’t research the place much, did you?” Gilbert asked.

  “What are you getting at?”

  “The last psychologist who sat on the seat you’re sitting on went mad, committed suicide on that very spot,” Gilbert said, and the flickering of the overhead lights and the dimness of the room made him out to be some sort of demonic oracle.

  “And that’s related to me how? Shrink suicide is very common, if you didn’t know,” she said, trying to hide a rising terror in her chest, but failing. Her voice quavered.

  “I was there. Back then I was called Ethan and I had a clean-shaven face. I was the first responder, one of the coppers,” he said. “Detective, to be frank.”

  “You must think I’m unhinged really badly… I’m not gonna buy that shit. You? A detective?” Carrie laughed. Everything made sense now. He was having his revenge on her by twisting her mind. The Ouija board was inexplicable, sure, but other than that, it all looked like a very well thought out prank.

  “Ms. Carrie Reynolds diddles her Jill with a purple dildo using her left hand. Has a gay ex-boyfriend. Sleeps with one foot out of the blanket, one foot in. Your Datsun’s parked on the fourth floor of the car park. Need me to go on?”

  She was speechless. How did he know all this? I’m going to call the cops on him…She thought. And then it hit her. What if he was telling the truth and he was the cops?

  “That’s exceedingly rude,” she said instead.

  “Rudeness gets the job done, luv,” he said. “The shrink before you was hearing all sorts of voices telling him what to do. I gathered as much from the recordings he made on his computer. The last one said ‘I believe everything I’ve heard. I’ve seen it with my eyes. The dread is real’ and then a gunshot resounds… and that’s how it ends.”

  “Show me,” Carrie said, somewhat convinced.

  “You need to take me back to my room, for the entrance lies there, and don’t be alarmed if you hear a friendly voice in your head. He’s Sullivan, the tamer of the two. But… Lord help you if you hear her,” he whispered this last part.

  “Her?”

  “You already know her name, I can tell. Mungo.”

  ***

  The floor beneath them shook as they walked from one end of t
he corridor to the other, where Gilbert’s wardroom was. Nurse Rachel made to follow them dutifully, but Carrie convinced her, after much cajoling, that it was all right and she had it under control. Rachel squinted at her and winced her nose as if thinking, I smell something fishy here.

  Having the psych ward on the ground floor was not the best layout. This way, whatever patient came in through the hospital doors could hear the laughter, the cries, and the manic mutters of the madmen and women in the rooms. It was unwelcoming. It was haunting.

  Right in the middle of the room, as the two of them passed it, was a giant elevator large enough to fit two stretchers and a dozen people. This was for the accommodation of patients to the floors above, and for emergency purposes if something calamitous were to happen. Wonky design at play, once again.

  The constriction and diffuseness were more present tonight than at any other night, and a humid heaviness—that might as well have been from the downpour outside—had impregnated the insides of the hospital, making everyone feel uncomfortable, unnerved.

  Carrie kept a close eye on Gilbert while she led him to his room. Other doctors and a couple of psychiatrists on their nightly rounds in the main ward saw her and displayed surprise at her being present so late in the night. She waved and smiled, made a little small talk as she passed, as she kept her eye on Gilbert, the feigning madman.

  They passed wardroom 119, and as they did, a haggard woman clambered against the plexiglass window of the door and screamed at Carrie. This was Trisha, a woman suffering from manic depressive disorder. Carrie was making progress with her, slow progress, but sometimes it felt as if all her efforts were in vain.

  I wonder how many of them are feigning like Gilbert? She thought, but then laughed at the hilarity of it, and dismissed it as she opened the door to room 120 with the keys Rachel had given her.

  Once inside, she saw for herself, for the first time, the mess this room was. And it was not of Gilbert’s making. The hospital janitors were to be blamed for this. Mud caked the barred window looking out over the garden behind the hospital. There were smidges of dirt, large chunks of them, covering the grim, brown walls of the room.

  A sane man would go crazy in here, let alone an already insane one, she thought.

  A commode stood in one corner of the room, and it smelt the worst. She put her hand on her nose and tried to flush the floating contents of the toilet, but unsuccessfully. The water was stagnant and thick, brown, and sickening, and it wouldn’t flush despite her attempts.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s out of order, dearie,” Gilbert said unapologetically. “The things one has to bear for research.”

  The bed, made of metal and covered with a crusty off-white blanket, was at the corner of the room, and the bleakness of the room filled the underside of it with darkness. She had no clue what was under it. Her mind, playing tricks on her, showed her a ghastly display of eyes—red and hungry. She shook her head and blinked twice, and the eyes were gone.

  “Not the presidential penthouse, but I’ve learnt to call it home. For whatever indefinite time, that is,” Gilbert said.

  “What do you want to show me, if there’s anything in here worth spectating at all?” she asked, still covering her nose with her hand, still squinting against the dark.

  The door creaked on its own and slammed shut. Carrie already had too many brushings with the paranormal today to be flabbergasted by this. But what happened next made her leak in her pants a little.

  An etheric entity, translucent in appearance yet possessing every semblance of a well-groomed man, stood in front of her. She could see Gilbert through him. She wanted to scream—not out of horror, no, she’d had enough of that today, but out of emotional overwhelmment—but her throat betrayed her with a raspy whimper.

  “Gilbert, my good man, is she the one?” the ghost asked Gilbert.

  “Aye, she be her,” Gilbert said and sat down on his bed. Clouds of dust came out of the mattress.

  “Is she initiated?” the ghost asked.

  “She is standing right here. Talk to me yourself,” Carrie found herself saying, more to her surprise than the others’.

  “Pardon, dear ma’am, but Gilbert has been of immense aid to me, and I was depending upon his prowess to fetch another ally for our cause,” the sceptre said.

  “What are you? What is happening? Can someone please explain something to me? Anything?” Carrie found herself overcoming her initial surprise at witnessing this bizarre ghost, and asking these tirades of questions.

  “We must explain things to you, we should. Sit down, wouldn’t you?” Gilbert implored and patted the mattress. More dust flew out of it.

  “I…I don’t have much time, my good man. Even if I leave the battle with Mungo for a moment, I fear she’ll start wreaking havoc in my absence,” the ghost said and disappeared in a whiff of ether.

  “You believe me now, don’t you?” Gilbert asked.

  “Yes. But explain it to me. Everything. So, I may help,” she said.

  And Gilbert began to tell her everything he knew, which was pretty much everything that had happened. Gilbert, or Ethan, or whatever other alias he went by, was a Hunter, from a long line of clergy Hunters. He explained everything to her… How Mungo held domain over this place a hundred years ago, how she was brought to her downfall by Sullivan, and how the evil brewed in the hidden basement beneath their feet.

  CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

  The Sceptre

  Grave understanding dawned upon her when Gilbert finally finished telling her all the gruesome details of the events that had occurred in these very unhallowed grounds a century before.

  Understanding gave way to panic, and then to depression. What was going to be her part in all this? She was—only a day ago—this regular adult with her regular adult problems, such as alcohol addiction and living in a shanty apartment, and now the burden of an evil larger than life was upon her.

  She felt weak. Beer and vodka, the only two things which she had consumed the entire day other than a stale burrito for breakfast, churned in her stomach, wanting out. She rushed for the shit stained toilet and vomited in it, spraying acidic juice from her mouth into the smelly toilet.

  “Geez,” Gilbert said and patted Carrie on her back in a there, there manner.

  “I’m okay,” she said, and then barfed again, this time spitting some of her vomit on the floor.

  “That’s gonna leave a stain,” Gilbert joked.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Are you sure? You sound like you could do with another barf.”

  “Fuck you.”

  When she was finally a little calmer, she sat down on the bed and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She felt disgusting, covered in sick and dredges of faeces from the toilet. That thought made her want to vomit again, but she held it in. This was worse than the time she had gone to see this horror movie with the same name as hers. There was this scene in the movie where the villains drop a bucket of pig blood over the protagonist. That had made Carrie really fucking sick. But this topped even that. This topped everything.

  “I’m scared,” she confessed to Gilbert and looked at him with sunken eyes. But there was a faint comfort in his, and she wanted to hug him. In that moment, she did not see him as a madman or an undercover cop, but as a friend who had shared a horrible secret with her, like friends in their childhood often do.

  I jerked off for the first time and I felt guilty, but good.

  My cat was creating a ruckus so I killed her.

  Stuff like that.

  “I was too, at first, but this is bigger than both of us. This is ancient evil, boiling, simmering in the basement like some witch’s pot left unattended, ready to spew hazard if not stopped. We are the only two people—because we’re initiated—who can help resolve this once and for all,” he said.

  “Why me?”

  “Why you? Because, Sullivan took a liking to you. Said you showed promise. Whatever that meant. But you’re okay, I guess. Time will tell,”
Gilbert said.

  “And why do you need two people? Where are your Hunter brethren?” she asked.

  “the Hunters disbanded, going freelance at the turn of the century. Now the Winchesters hunt in America, Constantine moves from London to Australia to America, wherever the finest tobacco takes him, or the cheapest. Gascoigne died, Gehrman went rogue, evil, so to speak. I’m the only one left in London, and I did call for aid, but no one was willing to partake without payment. There’s no money in this job. Only the pleasure of knowing that while you live, you ward off evil, making this green earth we live in a little less unpleasant,” Gilbert said.

  “Why do you need me on this holy grail quest of yours?” she asked, heavy with remnant terror.

  “Ah, for that I’d need to tell you the plan. Or show you the basement. Whatever you want first. I am going by the book here, and I have a plan, don’t you worry. And it needs two people. I’ll tell you about it later,” Gilbert told her. “But first you have to sneak me out of the hospital. Can you do that?”

  She thought hard, thinking of some diversion or a method of sneaking which would help her accomplish that, and then nodded.

  “Good girl.”

  Before they could leave the room, the floor shook again, this time with a magnitude suggesting it might break open and consume them both.

  The sceptre, whom Carrie had come to know as Sullivan, emerged from the shadows looking heavily beaten, bleeding a ghastly blood of pale moonlight. He looked at them both with tired eyes and said, “Hurry, my fellows. She grows strong. The veil of death, that which separates you from me, will not hold her for long. Run!”

  They had no time to heed his command. Suddenly a demonic appearance materialized, yet not quite, in front of them, pincers snapping at her face, tentacles slobbering from her base, giant arms scythe-like in appearance slashing at Sullivan, and a phantasmal body—white in a ghostly manner, but black in its semi-visible context. She was Madam Mungo, the horror that haunted Sacred Hearts Hospital. Many had she turned to madness, and many had she caused to kill themselves in the despair of her Cyclopean terror.