Thriller: Horror: The Cottage (Mystery Suspense Thrillers) (Haunted Paranormal Short Story)

by Stephen Kingston

  Meg’s thoughts then turned to Bella and the miracle that occurred after her birth. Somehow Meg had never conceived again. Robert had railed at first, destroying the house in search of birth control pills. Robert had even gone so far as to call Doctor Nelson, accusing him of somehow engineering some means to prevent Meg from conceiving another child. Meg did not know what prevented her from having another child but suspected it was the Lord’s work.

  Besides, she was pleased about her inability to conceive anymore. Bella was her crowning achievement and she was no longer burdened with pregnancy or caring for more infants. Meg knew that the Lord worked in mysterious ways and accepted her fate, happy to no longer be a baby machine. Robert never helped her with the children anyway so why he wanted so many she’d never quite understood.

  Meg prepared for bed and turned off all the machines that accompanied modern living, promising herself that tomorrow she’d take paint to all of those blue, red, green, and white lights that seemed to be a requirement for everything made in the modern world. As the house suddenly turned quiet, or as quiet as it could be with all of those appliances her kids bought her to make her life “easier” Meg made her way to her bedroom window to look over at the now decrepit house that used to belong to her best friend.

  For a moment Meg thought she saw Joan staring back at her from the tree that still stood in the front yard but then the image faded. Only a notion of her foggy brain, she told herself. Settling into her bed, the one modern comfort she truly appreciated, Meg pulled the old quilt over herself and sighed. The simple act of stretching out easing some of the constant aches in her body immediately.

  Meg’s eyes closed and she smiled, thinking of all of her children once more and finally settling on Bella. Bella was in Italy tonight, Meg saw it on the calendar. She’d be home in a few days and her favorite child would finally be at home. Meg had tried to hide her preference for Bella from the others but knew she’d sometimes failed. She’d done the best she could, however, and as her heart stopped in the middle of the night, the almost silent house going suddenly quieter, Meg went to her death peacefully knowing that she left her children happy and whole in the world and that was far more than some of her old friends could say.

  Chapter Eight

  Present Day, Louisa Falls

  “Who’s that woman, Beth? She looks familiar.” The young woman in the booth by the windows heard the man cooking behind the diner counter ask the waitress. Smiling to herself the young woman acted like she hadn’t heard them.

  “I’m not sure but you’re right, now that I think about it she does look familiar. I can’t place her but I know I’ve seen her before.”

  Looking down at her laptop and the files spread out on the table before her the young woman, actually a 38 year old woman with a degree in journalism went back to work. She brushed her dark chestnut hair behind her ear, away from her face, and looked again at the file on Doctor James Nelson. It seemed the hospital he’d operated, after eventually coming to be the head of the hospital, had closed a few months ago and the building was still being emptied. She’d heard gossip about that already from the couple behind her as they whispered to each other.

  “I heard Doctor Nelson used to torture women down in the basement, Bobby. I’m so glad they built the new general hospital before our babies were born.” The woman had whispered loudly.

  “Larry told me that he knew a man, used to work with him, whose wife just disappeared one night. Said the woman’s baby had been sold off and the woman was told the baby died. Seems the poor woman lost her mind, Debbie, and just ran off out into the woods to never be seen again.” Bobby had replied in an equally loud whisper.

  “Wow, I wonder about some of these tales we’ve heard. There has to be some kind of truth to them or we wouldn’t still be hearing them, surely? I wonder what their names were.”

  Debbie spoke again but this time so low the young woman had to lean back a little to hear the words.

  “I’ve heard people saying the hospital is haunted now. I heard one man saying patients wouldn’t go near it but you know, it’s been closed for a couple of months now”.

  The young woman noted down the words, the names, and took a bite of the apple pie and coffee she’d ordered for the end of her meal. She continued to write as they chatted behind her and was almost finished with her pie when they left. It seemed she wasn’t the only one that had had suspicions over the years. Taking the last bite she asked for her bill and paid before leaving.

  Going back to her hotel the young woman, famous in Charlotte but perhaps not so much on this side of North Carolina, called her producer at the news station she worked for and reported in.

  “I think we might have a story but I need to get into that hospital, can you arrange that for me?” She asked as she unlocked her room, pushing the door open.

  She settled into the room, putting her bag down, and kicked her shoes off as she listened to the voice on the other end of the line.

  “Great, I’ll talk to you in the morning then, let me know what you hear.” She paused for a moment listening to the speaker on the other end of the phone.

  The woman got up from her bed and walked to the bathroom, looking in the mirror at herself. Reddish brown hair with reddish brown eyes greeted her. A pretty face, still unlined unlike many of her college classmates faces now, and a trim figure greeted her. Not bad. And considering where I come from that’s doing pretty good, the woman thought to herself. Wandering over to the window she looked out at the mountain town, the lights barely hiding the night sky. She was home now and perhaps she’d finally get some truth about who she was.

  “So you’re a reporter?” The maintenance man asked, unlocking the door to the hospital as the young woman looked around the complex.

  “Yes, but I’m working on a documentary at the moment. How much access do I have?” The woman asked walking into the abandoned building.

  “Well, you have to stay away from patient files, though most of those should be shredded by now, and you should stay out of any areas that are marked as “do not enter”. I have to go check on that area where the tree fell the other day but I’ll be back shortly. Just stay in this wing until I can get back, alright?” The 40-something year-old man told the woman, not really wanting to leave her but needing to check on that damage. He’d already wasted two days of securing any damage because he’d been gone on a fishing trip. If he hurried the woman wouldn’t be alone for long anyway.

  “Sure, I’ll just stay close to the front here. Just shout when you’re back and I’ll come out to you.” The woman said with a smile, her fingers crossed behind her back.

  The man left and the woman ran over to a sign that showed where all of the doctor’s offices had been. Finding the office for Doctor Nelson the woman looked down the hall to where the man had disappeared and then walked quickly to the area where the office was. She pushed the door open and saw a desk, two filing cabinets, and some chairs.

  The woman went first to the desk, hoping to find something interesting there, but saw all of the drawers had been left open and were empty. She then moved to the filing cabinets. One was empty but all of the drawers were shut but the other one was full of files. She looked at the lock and realized someone had forced it open already so she didn’t feel as bad about digging through the cabinet. Someone else had already broken the lock so she didn’t have to go that far.

  She went through all of the drawers, finding nothing of interest until she got to the bottom drawer. She pulled out a cloth bag that had been taped shut a long time ago by the looks of the tape. The entire bag had been taped over and from the feel of it the contents were files. Hearing the guard calling for her the young woman slipped the bag and its contents into a bag of her own before heading out of the door of the office, hoping she hadn’t left behind signs of her own pilfering. Going back into the room to slide the drawer shut that she’d left open the woman panicked, hoping the man wasn’t coming down the hall, as a spur of the moment ide
a hit her. She ran to a window and unlocked it. The woman started to hear footsteps so she ran out of the room and down the hall until she saw the man.

  The tour of the building continued once she’d caught up with the man and he seemed to not notice anything suspicious. The young woman smiled at him as he took her through the building, showing off the state of the art changes Doctor Nelson had made in the late 1980s but failed to update since. Even the walls were still painted that horrible green that people associated with hospitals so long ago.

  The power was still on in the building and they used the elevators to go up each floor but the woman noticed the maintenance man did not take her to the floors below the first floor and they skipped the fourth floor altogether. The woman didn’t mention the fact that they’d skipped so many floors she simply noted the oversight and carried on with the tour.

  “What is that in the very back there? That area with the tall fence and that black sheeting over the top?” The woman asked, her nose pressed to the glass of a window on the fifth floor.

  The man walked over to the window and looked out. For a moment the man’s face was grim but then the look disappeared, replaced with a blank look. “That’s just Doctor Nelson’s little hospital garden. –Apparently he grew flowers from seeds he’d imported from all over the world there. Never did make sense how he could do that with that black fabric hanging over it all but what do I know.”

  The tour concluded after that with the woman making notes of the things she’d seen as they went down to the ground floor in the elevator. Curiosity burned in her mind, though she presented a calm exterior, and she was dying to know what was taped up so securely in that bag. Her curiosity was so great she went through the only drive through in the small town rather than going back to the diner she’d eaten at the night before then rushed back to her hotel room, pulling the package out of her own bag as she shut the door.

  The tape had somehow melded together and wouldn’t come lose so the woman pulled at it, attempting to break the seal until it snapped apart and the whole pile of tape fell loose from the cloth bag. The woman pulled the bag away and found three cardboard files inside. With awe she read the names and knew who the three women were without even reading the files. These were the women she’s heard the men talking about at the cemetery, the women she’d heard the couple talking about at the diner; she just knew it. One of these women was her mother and now she might finally find out which it was.

  With shaking hands the woman ran a finger over the names on the file, reading each one aloud.

  “Anne Rasnake. Joan Parker. Meg Skaggs. What are your stories?”

  Chapter Nine

  Present Day, Louisa Falls

  Inga Parr, documentarian and reporter, looked down at the files she now had spread on her bed and wondered which of these women was her mother? She’d gone the logical route and looked at birthdays, the days the mothers were told their children had died, and anything else she could think of but the files revealed no more to her than the information about the women, none of the files contained information about the children stolen from them.

  Inga sat back against the headboard, not sure what she should do next. Inga had come to Louisa Falls in an attempt to find out the truth. The truth of who she was, who her birth mother was, and if the story her adoptive mother Alice had told her was true. From what Inga had read so far the part Alice had told her was true.

  “Your mother was some poverty stricken woman from the hills of North Carolina. Your father and I were desperate and we met Doctor Nelson when we were trying to conceive. He moved away but about a year later he contacted us and told us that if we had the money he had a baby we could adopt, no questions asked. We’d been planning to adopt but the process was so long so arduous that we contacted him back a day later and agreed. We had to pay a lot of money but two days later you were ours and we brought you home with us.” Alice’s voice had fallen to almost a whisper as she spoke from her deathbed, her conscience not allowing her to leave Inga in the dark anymore.

  “You bought me?” Inga had screeched, stunned beyond words. Looking at the cancer stricken woman on the bed Inga’s entire world felt like it shifted as the words kept coming.

  “Yes, we were told your real mother was very poor and the doctor told her you’d died so she’d never come looking for you or try to take you away from us. You have to understand Inga; it was a different world, a different time. We thought we were doing the woman a favor and Doctor Nelson was being kind to the woman and her family. I felt guilty at first but then I learned to love you and you became my world. I couldn’t have given you back if the US Army was standing outside with their rifles ready. You were mine and I loved you no differently than if I’d given birth to you. Nobody could take you from me. But it’s time you know the truth now.” Alice’s words stopped and she spoke no more that night. She passed away in her sleep and Inga was left with far more questions than answers.

  A month after the funeral Inga had convinced her producer there was a story here that needed to be told and started digging up information. From her own birth certificate she learned she’d been born in Louisa Falls but the parents’ names had been listed as her adoptive parents. The attending doctor’s name had been listed though and Inga was able to do some research on him.

  He’d been a good doctor in his time but the hospital he administered was growing old and decrepit and the state shut it down. Inga found a website where a few people asked about stories they’d been told about their adoptions and Inga contacted the people but their addresses were either old and out of date or they simply never responded. Inga had been disappointed to get no response but forged ahead with her idea and her producer approved a budget for the investigative piece Inga had planned out.

  And then Inga had received an email with several document files attached from one of the people she’d emailed. These files had revealed information that Inga had found even more sinister than what she’d already uncovered. Doctor James Nelson was the son of Doctor Klaus Meyers, a notorious mass murderer convicted in the late 1940s. Doctor Meyers had been performing experiments on African American and poverty stricken women during World War II, attempting to find a way to sterilize women with a single shot while also attempting to force embryos to split into multiple children in pregnant mothers.

  During the darkest days of the war, hidden away in a mountain town in West Virginia, the doctor had murdered over 300 women in his experiments to sterilize those he deemed unworthy of life and caused birth defects in countless other children in an attempt to produce an army of blond white children to continue the fight against the colored people of the world. Doctor Meyers had been a firm believer in Eugenics and an American supporter of the Nazi party from his parents’ homeland in Germany.

  When the war ended and the men started coming home the questions and concerns of mothers and the relatives of those that had gone missing were finally heard. Doctor Meyers had been investigated and a sensational trial was held, drawing crowds from all over the country. His son James changed his name from Meyers to Nelson and went quietly through his life. Or so it appeared from the outside. Inga suspected Doctor Nelson held many of his father’s beliefs and may have even continued some of his experiments.

  Now here she was with these files but no closer to an answer. Inga has always known she was adopted, the fact never made her feel different or unloved, and it simply made her curious. She also wondered about the nightmares she had, nightmares of being strapped down to a table, the crackling sound of electricity coming closer and closer until she woke up sweating and with her heart pounding just before the electricity shocked her. Sometimes there was a large woman present, cackling maniacally as she turned the dial up on some kind of machine. The nightmares still plagued Inga but not as often as they used to.

  Inga had another thought and scanned through the files looking for place names and names of people. She stopped when she read the words “electro-shock therapy” in Anne’s file. The doc
tor had written up a report on an “accident” when one of the nurses had administered the therapy to Anne without his consent. The doctor wrote that he was concerned about irreparable damage but that perhaps it was for the best.

  Inga sat back once more, stunned that the doctor didn’t mention punishment for the nurse. It was a medical file, though, so perhaps the woman had been punished after all? Inga decided to take another approach and settled into the bed after putting on a pot of coffee. She was going to read through each file, one by one, and then look for answers.

  Inga flipped back to the first page of Anne’s file, noting in a notepad the date when the file started, and taking notes as she read through the file. Inga was astonished to read that the doctor hadn’t bothered to hide his falsehoods to Anne in the file, writing in-depth about the woman’s reaction to his lies and how he’d dealt with her questions. He’d even written how much he’d sold Anne’s baby for and how he’d handed the baby over.

  The most shocking aspect of Anne’s file for Inga, out of whole pile of shocks brought on by the entire file, was Anne’s mother Sophia’s role in the whole debacle. Sophia had demanded a quarter of the money the baby brought initially but then half after Anne was given over to her care. The doctor had noted Sophia’s greed and postulated that the women’s greed and cruel behavior stemmed from her poverty and was a result of a life lived in poverty. Doctor Nelson wrote in detail about how greedy Sophia was and how that kind of greed needed to be stamped out of the white race because it was a sign of low breeding.

  Inga could only shake her head as she tried to take it all in and reached for one of the snack cakes she’d stocked her room with the day before. Eating the cake with another cup of coffee Inga reached for Anne’s file once more. The latter part of the woman’s life had been endless experiments with drugs, both tranquilizers and pain pills on the doctor’s part, and a few more doses of EST to see if they could bring her out of her stupor with controlled applications of the so-called therapy. He’d given Anne a pill in the last years of her life that was known to cause addiction, even in small doses. Doctor Nelson had even deliberately given Anne overdoses at various times over the years to try to “make his problem go away”, as he’d written, but Anne had always survived. Inga had done several reports on the dangers of the pill and couldn’t believe Doctor Nelson had given the drug to Anne.