It looked like the time had come for me to do some Hardy Boy stuff. I needed answers. Question 1: What the fuck? Question 2: Also what the fuck? What was the status of hospital? Where was the Army? What happened to the destroyed parts of the hospital? Why weren’t these people talking about what happened? Why was this part of the hospital so dirty and the nurses so… different?
I walked down the hallway, Katie in tow. The hallway was dim, the lighting not as bright as the rest of the hospital. The doors on the hallway were different as well. These doors had brown wood finishes that looked not only out of style but in need of repair. White plates with thick black numbers labeled the doors. The offices had a pane of frosted glass, but other doors were just wood. Most of these were offices, though down a side hall, I saw what appeared to be patient rooms. Strange that on this wing the patient rooms were mixed in with offices without the dividing walls or even a metal gate. I didn’t see anyone in the halls, which was good, since I wanted to keep a low profile. The janitor seemed not to care that we were looking around, but I’m not sure everyone else would be so blasé.
I heard voices from a side hallway and I flattened against the wall, hoping the dimness of the hallway would hide us. I held my breath, listening as I heard the clack of loud heels coming this way. I turned and looked behind me, noticing Katie standing dumbly in the middle of the hallway, looking at me strangely. I waved for her to flatten against the wall, but she just stood there. She tilted her head and looked at me. The footsteps were becoming louder. I stepped forward and quickly grabbed her, pulling her against the wall with me.
Against the wall, my breath held, I listened for the heels coming from the side corridor on my right. We were maybe ten feet from the corridor intersection. If they turned left, it would be difficult for them not to see us unless they were oblivious. In my head, I hoped they didn’t turn left. The footsteps were louder, they were definitely women’s heels, so it was a nurse. Please don’t turn left, please don’t turn left.
The nurse came into view. It was the fat nurse I had seen previously, Nurse Phillips if I recalled correctly. There was someone to her right, but I could not see them due to the nurse’s girth. I was in luck, though. They turned right. As they turned, I got a look at the other person. It was a teenage boy in a bathrobe. His hair was dark and he looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. I watched as the nurse led him down the hall to a door, pausing before it.
“And here we are,” said the nurse. “Now Mr. Schraeder, I want you to take note of how we do things here. This is a place of order. And for that order to continue, authority must be respected. I know you have had trouble with authority in the past, but here at Sommersfield, you will respect authority at all times. Now we shall give you a taste of what happens to those who do not show the proper respect.”
With that, she led him in the room, the door closing loudly behind her. The hallway was silent again.
I was curious. Before, I was perfectly happy with hiding out until things improved. But at this point, I’d been dicked around and weirded out too much to leave stuff alone. I had questions I needed answered, and I was damn well going to find some answers. The nurse seemed to know something. If not, she seemed to be in charge here. Perhaps I could find something out. We crept over to the door.
The door was like most others, brown finish with a pane of frosted glass. I crouched down, so I wouldn’t cast a shadow through the glass. The room did not have a label with a number or a name, just three letters: ECT. I wasn’t sure what that signified. I tried listening, but I couldn’t hear speaking. I peered up at the window, but couldn’t see clearly through it due to the frosting. What I could see was the shadow of the nurse moving around the room, bending over this and that. She kept returning to the center of the room, which is where I expected there was a table or something. I did not see a shadow for the boy, nor did I hear him say anything. What did she mean “a taste of what happens?”
I looked back at Katie, who was crouched down with me. She was looking up at the letters ECT with concern.
“Do you know what ECT means?” I whispered.
She didn’t look at me, but still stared at the letters. Then finally she shook her head once with hesitation, then shook her head a few times. Then she hid her head, face down, almost in her armpit.
I turned back to the window, noticing the nurse back in the center of the room again. “And now we’ll begin. Remember this feeling. Remember it well,” she said before moving to one side of the room, her shadow out of my view.
I still wondered what she meant. Suddenly, the room was full of screaming. I jumped back, almost falling backwards. Katie looked at me wide-eyed, her expression absolute terror. The screaming continued, the very obvious wail of that poor teenage boy. I looked down the hallway either way, expecting concerned people to come running to try to stop the pain. Even after thirty seconds, there was no reaction. The hallway was empty, filled only with the horrible screaming.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. There was so much anguish in that scream. I had to do something. I couldn’t be the man who walks away. I clenched my fist and squared my shoulders. I looked at that door with such anger. Then I hurled myself at the door, busting it open. I heard a crack as I broke the lock, the door slamming against the wall. Inside I was surprised by what I saw.
The center of the room held a table out of a B-movie. Strapped to the table was the young boy, still screaming and writhing in pain. Electrodes were attached to the boy’s head, wires leading to a huge machine that took up a majority of the room. At the controls of the machine was the nurse, her mouth gaping at me. Soon a shriek erupted from her mouth. I stood in the middle of the room, panting, glaring at the nurse with rage.
“How dare you!” shouted the nurse, turning to glare at me. Still panting, I glared back at her, murder in my eyes. I couldn’t believe someone could do that to someone else. In that moment, I felt I could kill her, if only to save the boy. We glared at each other, neither backing down. Her resolve finally broke and she screamed again. Then she threw up her arms and screamed a third time, running past me out of the room, her massive girth nearly knocking me over.
I ran over to the controls of the machine, still hearing the screams of the boy. I looked at the console of buttons, lights, and letters. Katie entered the room, covering her ears, running over to me.
“How do I turn it off?” I shouted, pressing buttons and pushing levers. Finally I found a dial labeled with numbers. I twisted it to zero and the boy immediately stopped writhing, his screams abating. I sighed, my breath rasping. After a moment to relax, I went over to the table, pulling the electrodes off the boy. My hands shaking, I removed the leather straps from the boy. I looked down at the boy. He was unconscious but he looked to be no longer in pain. Katie wiped the hair out of his face. He still looked familiar to me, but I just couldn’t figure out how.
“Come on,” I said to Katie, “we need to get out of here. I don’t want her to bring a gang of orderlies back here.”
Katie looked at me and back down at him. Then she looked at me again. “Him?”
“He’ll be fine.”
She looked at him and me again. “Him?”
“He’ll be fine. Really. Look, we can’t take him with us. What she was doing to him wasn’t legal. They’ll come here and find the torture stuff. But if we’re here when they show up, it will be really bad for us.” I held out my arm for her. “Come on.”
She looked at him again. I waved my arm in the air again insistently. Finally she took my hand and we ran all the way down to the end of the hall. There was a door for the stairwell. I grabbed the door and gestured Katie in. I followed behind her, running halfway up the stairs, making sure it was clear. Then I went back to the door we entered, peering out for the group of orderlies or security guards that would have been summoned for the nurses. I watched for a few minutes.
No one came.
I sat back against the stairs in my adrenaline crash. My breathing had
slowed and my muscles had begun aching again. Katie sat higher up on the steps, looking at nothing in particular through the bars in the stair railing. I let my mind wander as I rested. What was up with this crazy hospital? It was pretty messed up before we passed out, now it was just weird. Run down hallways, torture devices, strange nurses, and no one running to help either the patients or the nurses. The walls were peeling and I had seen quite a few roaches, giving this place the feeling that it was abandoned or about to be. The previous wings of the hospital had been up to date and clean, a high class affair. Why was this wing ignored while the others cared for? And why have patients in this run down wing?
Then there was the Army question. What happened to them?
“What’s going on here?” I asked rhetorically, laying my head back on the stairs. I could see Katie above me, who shrugged and made a childlike noise indicating she didn’t know.
I pulled out my cell phone. Yup, still no signal.
I put my phone away and scratched my head. I felt rested enough. Time to figure out some stuff. I stood up, wiping off my pants. I wanted to find a window that looked out on the front of the hospital. I assumed the Army had gone, would be too big an assumption. I need to know for myself. I walked up the steps to the second floor landing. I put my hand on the door and started to push before I stopped, letting go of the door and staring at the sign next to the door.
The sign next to the door said Wing B.
I stared at the sign for a long time. It was an old, worn out sign with its letters in a black blocky retro font. I wondered if it was a mistake, but it clearly said Wing B. The same Wing B I had been in earlier where I met Max. But Wing B was nothing like this. I had been through most of the wing and it had been white, well-kept, and bright. Wing B was almost completely patient rooms, but this wing I had just been through had been offices and patient rooms mixed together. Where was the big glass partition with the key card readers? Where was the antiseptic hall design?
I had just been on the first floor, which was the same floor I had been on before. I opened the second floor door, just to be sure they hadn’t been misnumbered. I looked out. Dim lights, peeling walls, the hall empty except for a roach creeping across twenty feet down. Was there another Wing B? Was the sign wrong? I closed the door and trotted down the stairs to the first floor landing. The sign next to the door also said Wing B.
I checked the stairwell map. The overall corridor structure was the same as the Wing B map I had seen, though strangely, there were some side hallways I didn’t remember from before. The room names were different and the map key in a different font, but otherwise it was mostly the same. I could trace my journey through Wing B with Max on this map. How could this place be so different? Something was very wrong.
I saw the lounge I had passed earlier on the map. The one that smelled of burning, the one I feared that the nurses had died in. I decided that’s what I needed to see. For my own sanity. There would be burn marks, scorching, something. I just needed to verify it.
“We’re going,” I said, grabbing Katie’s wrist. With her trotting behind me, trying to keep up as I held her wrist, I walked quickly down the corridors. I was determined to find out, and I didn’t care about nurses, patients, or I security. I needed to know this, even if they wanted to toss me in jail afterwards. I turned down hallway after hallway, Katie scrambling behind me until I finally let go of her wrist. I kept going, sure she was following me, just now at a more comfortable speed.
I passed where the glass doors should be, finding just a regular hallway, unbarred and unblocked. I didn’t even see discolored areas of the walls where it could have been ripped out. It was like the doors had never even been there.
I found the room easily because it was still labeled as a nurse’s lounge. The same brown wood finish and frosted glass pane, not like the last time I was here. Without even pausing, I flung the door open and walked into the room. I expected to smell smoke and ash. While there was a faint smell of cigarettes mixed into the air, there was something stronger in the air. Instead of ash I smelled something else, something equally unpleasant. I couldn’t place it at first, but the air was thick and saturated with it. It smelled like danger.
The lounge was taken up by three of the ugliest couches I had ever seen; covered with a brown, beige, and green plaid pattern. A coffee table sat in the middle of the couches, an ash tray holding a mountain of cigarette butts. The walls were an ugly tan transitioning into a sickly yellow used for the drapes around the windows. Windows! I ignored the danger sense and small and walked over to the windows on the other side of the couches, pulling the drapes aside so I could look out. The drapes were heavier than they should be and the smell stronger, but at the moment I was more concerned with looking out. I looked to the front of the hospital and saw nothing. Nothing. Just parking lot and grass. Not even tracks in the grass where the Army would have been dug in.
In my disappointment, I turned around to look at Katie, who strangely refused to come into the room. Turning around, my foot hit something. At the same moment, I noticed how strong the smell was and that something was dripping off the drapes. I looked down and caught my breath.
On the ground below me, hidden behind the couches was the large bloody body of Nurse Phillips.
I involuntarily stepped backwards, my body bumping into the windows, causing me to grab at the drapes. The bottoms of the drapes were splattered with blood, drenched where they touched the pool of blood. I now recognized the smell of blood, the smell of death.
When I recovered my senses, I asked Katie to wait in the hall. This was unnecessary, as she refused to come in, her eyes wide and her head shaking. I peered down at the body. Nurse Phillips had been stabbed. Many times. I started counting wounds and stopped counting after twelve. They all looked like large knife wounds. Any more than that I didn’t know, I’m not a forensics expert. I felt bile rise in the back of my throat. I thought she was a monster for torturing the boy, but she didn’t deserve this. Not only to die, but to be practically mutilated with stab wounds. This was the work of a greater monster than her.
I stepped back from the body. My stomach felt queasy. I slowly made my way back across the room. I realized I had stepped in the blood and was tracking it across the room. A newspaper was lying on the couch. I picked it up and wiped my shoe with it, trying to get enough of the sticky stuff off my shoe. I was trying hard not to puke my guts out from seeing the body, and this provided me some sort of normalcy. The smell was getting to me; I needed to get out of the room.
I closed the door behind me and breathed fresh air. My stomach improved, but my state of mind did not. I was still rattled by seeing the body. I had seen so much death since I entered this hospital, yet each time it was fresh and shocking. I almost wished I could become numb to the sight of death, but that blessing had not been given to me yet.
Katie was sitting on the floor against the wall, and I suddenly thought that was a good idea. I slumped against the wall next to her, letting out a long breath. I knew we should be getting away from the murder, either hiding ourselves or letting someone know about it. But at this moment, I couldn’t take it. I needed to sit down for a while.
The back pages of the newspaper I still held onto were covered with blood. Luckily, most of the front of the paper was unharmed. Simultaneously curious to see if the newspaper had anything about the hospital and wanting to find something to distract my mind, I folded it back to the front page and began reading. The newspaper of choice was the Newport Times. Headlines were about a local man found murdered and higher taxes. Pretty boring stuff. I flipped through to the entertainment section. Movie reviews. Back to the Future, The Goonies, Weird Science. Must be some place running a revival. I looked at the showings, curious to know what theater in town was doing a Totally Eighties revival. That might be the place to hit before I fly out of Vermont, to clear my mind of all of this. I could always go for old films, particularly if they were fun and irony was high.
Strange. I l
ooked at the listings. Two of the theaters were playing those films. No, three. No… Wait, every theater was playing those movies. The reviews were not listing the films as revivals or retro. It was listing them as first run. First run for such old films? I flipped quickly back to the front of the paper and read the date.
August 15th, 1985.
I stared at the date for a moment. I wondered why someone had brought in an old newspaper. Who wants to read a decades old newspaper? It was just hanging around in the lounge. It was remarkably well preserved for such an old paper, before the blood at least. I felt sorry I had ruined someone’s well-preserved artifact. Maybe someone’s kid was using it for a report, and they just happened to bring it in and leave it in the lounge. Maybe…
Then it hit me. It all added up. Old school nurse’s uniforms. Old logos on cleaning supplies. Ugly retro couches. The falling apart hospital. Didn’t Lorraine say that the hospital nearly closed during the mid Eighties? If I hadn’t seen so much that didn’t make sense, if I hadn’t had my mind brutalized by all this death, if I didn’t have so many things that connected, I wouldn’t believe it. It didn’t make any good sense.
I sat there for a while, not wanting to believe it. I added things up in my mind over and over, but I still kept coming to the same conclusion, the one that best fit the data. It shouldn’t make sense, there should have been a better explanation. I searched for something else that made sense, something other than the strange conclusion in front of me. But here it was. Somehow I had traveled back in time.
The Lost and the Damned Page 13