During the day, the asylum was different, busy with nurses and doctors, amplifying her headache and shame–at least she wouldn’t see Nurse Johnson today.
Doctor Lee led her through his office door, which she found odd since the night before, he’d almost slammed it in her face. He motioned for her to sit down, which was also weird; the doctor had never shown her such consideration when they last met.
“This morning, our therapist tried something new with 29-A,” Doctor Lee started, and Ritzy sat more comfortably, sensing this wouldn’t be about her but the girl she used to watch over. “We asked her to draw herself, using any color she wanted, any place and time. Here is what she drew.” Now Ritzy got nervous, not only from his ice-cold tone, but the way he slid the heavily marked piece of paper across his crowded desk.
Five black shadows circled a bed on which a girl lay, spread wide, bleeding from every orifice, her huge belly a glowing blue hue, and seven children flying above. Disturbing, but not as much as the force that went into each pen stroke, whether it was red or black or blue, some passing right through the sheet of paper.
“Do you have something to say, Nurse Pallek?” Doctor Lee said, after Ritzy stared in horror for more than a minute. This is what she’d told him the night before, what the girl had told her: that incorporeal men were raping her, and she was having babies, who were also ghosts.
“No, I don’t,” Ritzy answered, appalled at the sickness and the strangeness before her. Ritzy looked at the doctor as she handed him back the drawing, but he stopped her with a smile.
“Oh wait, there’s more.” He slid a half-dozen sheets across the desk, each more graphic than the last, the final one with the girl drawn only in red–her blood. “Here’s my question: How can this girl know exactly what you told me in this office last night? How can she know you told me about spooks and possession? Have you begun a relationship so strong with her that you have confided your ridiculous diagnosis to her? How does she know what you said last night in this very room?”
“I think something is terribly wrong with this girl.” Ritzy heard the same words she’d used twelve hours before, and stopped herself. “I only told you what she told me.” What else could she say? He didn’t believe her, never would. “I’m here to help patients in need, what more could I have done?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me,” Doctor Lee said with a shake of the head. “Her parents will be here soon. They’re coming to sign the release form for the operation and have asked to see her before we perform it.” Ritzy lost her balance, her world turned upside down. “And I think it’s best if you steer clear, Nurse Pallek.”
“Operation?” Her voice a hallow void. A lump of the possessed girl, lobotomized, flashed through her mind.
“She is violent and disturbed, there is no respite in her life. We must make it easier for her; it’s our job. This institution’s purpose is to make her better.” Ritzy’s stomach turned into stone from doubt and fear.
“What are you planning on doing to her, Doctor?” Ritzy stood up, both hands holding onto the desk separating them. “How do you think you’ll make her better?”
He only smiled, shook his head and neatly piled the drawings. “Don’t you worry, she won’t be such a heavy charge from tomorrow morning on.” He looked up at her and dismissed her with his hand. “That will be all.”
Ritzy walked out, numbness overtaking her body.
* * *
Gloomy thoughts surged every time she tried to push them away. 29-A was sick, her brain diseased, and that was the end of it. Nothing to do about it, not her concern, she was not losing her job over an irrationality.
I felt them, in the room. I saw them, at her place. They exist, the ghosts are real. Where will that lead me? Inside these walls, but not for work, for an indeterminate length of time. What would Tom say about that? That I’ve lost my mind, too.
Ritzy imagined her life from now on: never speaking her mind, at work and at home, stuck in a loveless marriage and a soulless job. Was she to become like them: Nurse Johnson with her cold, heartless efficiency, and Doctor Lee with his willful blindness?
No way I’ll live my life stuck in a shell. Her heart pounded as she dreamed of changing the girl’s parents’ mind about the operation. If they don’t, I’ll get her out of here. We’ll stay with Jamie and everything will be all right. Her new dream, this future. It had to work; her own sense of self depended on it.
The guest book was signed with both parents’ names, so Ritzy rushed to Doctor Lee’s office, which was empty. The corridor echoed back her running footsteps, as she raced by windows where patients enjoyed the sunny afternoon outside.
Reaching 29-A, she stopped to catch her breath, and she detected something in the air. The sharp tang of iron came from the closed room, the curtained window giving no view of its interior. From inside, the girl’s voice peaked with urgency, and Ritzy leaned on the door, listening.
“Are you happy now? I’m giving up!”
A loud crash startled Ritzy. Something bad was happening in there, she could feel it. Then she noticed the blood puddle under the door, and tried the knob; locked.
Hysterical, the girl cried, “You’ll never have me again!”
A strange gurgling sound reached Ritzy and she banged on the door, the uneasy feeling engulfing her. She kicked at it and it opened, as if it had never been locked in the first place.
Bodies littered the floor, blood splattered the walls and bed, and gore dripped from the bedside tables and lone chair. Doctor Lee sat by the door, eyes open and unblinking, white coat soiled with red fluid oozing from his gutted stomach.
A man and a woman–the girl’s parents, no doubt–were holding hands where they lay, skulls cracked open, brain matter and gore painting the walls, as blood and more blood puddled the floor. The man was facing the ceiling, mouth twisted in a silenced cry.
Ritzy heard laughter, but she was the only one alive in the room. She looked for the girl, slipping on the bloody floor when she heard the beat of death.
29-A’s body thumped the wall, hanging by the neck from a belt, suspended from the ceiling where the florescent light had been ripped down. Dead–nothing could be done–but in her young face, Ritzy read deliverance.
“Now it’s your turn,” a voice shot from behind Ritzy. In her haste to see who’d spoken, she slipped to the ground, her white dress and hands wet with blood. “I want to hear you scream.”
Five men, black and blue and cold, towered over her, and as her cry turned into a long wail, ghostly children’s faces peeked at her from behind the ghosts’ legs. As they approached shyly with their hands outstretched to reach her, they desperately cried, calling, “Mommy!”
She who likes dark things never grew up. She never stopped listening to gothic, industrial and alternative bands like when she was fifteen. She always loved to read horror and dystopia and fantasy, where doom and gloom drip from the pages.
She, who was supposed to make films, decided to write short stories, novelettes and novels instead. She, who’s had her films listed on festival programs, has been printed in a dozen anthologies and magazines since. Dark Fuse published her first collection of dark short stories for young adult, Girls & Monsters.
She who likes dark things prefers night to day, rain to sun, and horror to anything else.
-Gourd
by P. Gardner Goldsmith
“I just don’t find that scary,” Josh said above the din of the breeze. “To me, viscera and gore simply aren’t very frightening. If I want to see that, I’ll open a biology book.”
You seem the type, Steph thought, as he eased the convertible to a halt at another empty intersection. The lush grass and weeds bordering it swayed fitfully in the humid air, and dark clouds clotted above, reminding her that she’d been wrong about pretty much everything on this date.
Over the past five hours, Steph had begun to appreciate a profound incongruity between her expectations and reality. If she dressed for a day that was supposed to
be sunny and dry, it would probably become gloomy and wet. If her co-workers told her that the handsome young owner of the CPA firm upstairs had eyes for her, he’d probably turn out to be a buttoned-down anal-retentive. Poetic hopes and dreams weren’t much protection when reality could move like a runaway train, and she should have seen this wreck coming from a mile away.
She watched him flip the directional, then slowly, carefully, turn the car right, onto yet another bleak, untenanted dirt road.
“What scares me,” Josh continued, “is the idea that there’s something out there. Something truly evil, ya know?”
She didn’t give him the satisfaction of a response.
“Some presence, waiting for you to do something stupid. And it’s in that instant, when it emerges, that you realize you’re doomed, and it grabs you, and grins, and says…‘Got ya!’”
He flashed a dumb, quirky smile, and it was enough to make Steph turn away in frustration. She glanced at her watch, tilted her head back, stared at the forbidding sky, and let the wind tug her long, unruly locks. The chaotic sensation of her hair whipping about in the humid gusts didn’t give her much pleasure, but it was at least a distraction from his nattering and the oppressive boredom of the day.
“So,” he said after a pregnant pause, “you traveled a lot as a kid?”
She cleared her throat. “If you can call it ‘travel.’ I told you I was an orphan, remember?”
“Oh, yeah, right.”
“So, as an orphan, you pretty much go where the system tells you. I was shuttled from one foster home to another until I was sixteen.”
He glanced at her.
“What’d you do when you were sixteen?”
“I ran away. Squatted in Hartford with some friends. Got a job at a bank, and got away from the bitch who used me as a maid while telling people I was ‘her daughter.’”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Wow, that’s risky! But I guess it turned out for the best. If you hadn’t been working the teller window a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have noticed you, and we wouldn’t be here together now.”
“Mm-hmm.”
For once, he seemed to notice her lack of enthusiasm, and he glanced at her. “I’m sorry if the party flat-lined for you, Steph. I grew up with most of those people and we like to keep in touch. But nowadays, given how successful all our businesses are, we only get to see each other about once a year. When I got the invite to Frederick’s signing, I didn’t know the reading was going to be so graphic.”
“That’s okay, Josh. I’m tougher than I look.”
She knew it was her own damn fault for being in this situation. Without embarrassment, Josh had just stated the obvious. He was rich. And that keen personality trait had been what attracted Stephanie to him in the first place. Her last foster mom had always stressed that she target good financial prospects, men with business acumen and confidence–“advice” that came only when the lazy bitch wasn’t balling some guy, or getting drunk or stoned.
“Make sure the bulge in his pants is a money-clip,” the old hag had teased between cackles and sips of gin. “That’ll keep ya off the streets.”
Steph hated to remember those days, but the drunk’s cynical words had stuck. As she matured, as she clawed her way out of the system and into the business world, her sensual desires responded to those attributes as well. And at first glance, Josh Hanover seemed to have it all.
But as Richard Dawson would put it, the survey said otherwise.
Turned out he was the kind who anxiously peered around every corner as he steered an expensive, high-performance sports car he’d probably never push over eighty. He was offering uptight views of his friend’s work, and he was nervously mistaking her silent ruminations about decoupling herself from this date for what he thought were her offended sensibilities–as if she couldn’t handle a few gory words and sexually explicit lines of dialogue in a small press novel.
“It looks like it’s going to rain,” she said. “Think you should put up the top?”
“To each his own, huh? Maybe Fred’s been harboring an interest in this gory cult stuff for a long time.” His voice seemed to take on a lighter tone with the realization. “Frederick Smith: bondage and torture fetishist!”
Again he gave her that oddball grin.
That’s it. All you can do now is just ride this afternoon out.
“Crap,” he said.
“What?”
“I forgot to get gas.” He focused on the dash of the Porsche, then scanned the road ahead. “We gotta find a station. We’re running on empty.”
“Are you kidding? We’re out in the middle of Squeal-like-a-pig, Connecticut, and you forgot to gas up?”
“I didn’t realize the trip was so long, Steph. I’m sorry.”
He looked at her with those brown eyes she had once found attractive. They were wide and pleading.
“I’m sure we have enough to find a station,” she commented bitterly, feeling her stomach coil with tension, scanning the horizon over the weeds.
“Absolutely. Absolutely.”
He drove on. With each hillock, Steph felt her hopes rise and fall. Nothing appeared but more desolate brown dirt, bordered by high-rise weeds, and her mind sought escape. She thought of all the missed opportunities for a Saturday afternoon, thought of where she could be instead of this godforsaken place: the nail salon, the mall, any bar.
A few miles later, the car coughed and sputtered.
“Uh-oh,” he said.
The engine fell silent after one more plaintive wheeze, its last bit of horsepower pushing the vehicle into a quiet roll that Josh directed onto the edge of the tall grass.
When their momentum was spent, he pulled the handbrake, and they sat there for a moment.
“Well…” He sounded almost jovial, “looks like I won’t be working for NASCAR anytime soon.”
She said nothing, muscles and tendons in her neck tightening.
“Care to go for a walk with me, mademoiselle?”
She studied the vacant dirt road, saw the weeds growing like cornstalks beside her, and considered the prospect of spending more time with Josh versus the idea of sitting, alone, in the convertible.
Easy decision.
“I’ll stay here, thanks.”
“To each his own. You’re gonna miss a great stroll through Connecticut’s best farm country.”
Rounding the front of the car, he removed a gasoline can from the storage area beneath the hood. But something made a dull “thump” on the burgundy finish as he clicked the lid closed.
He blinked.
Another “thump” sounded, then another.
“Goddammit!” she spat, as a heavy raindrop caught her on the forehead.
He held his palms up to her. “Hold on, Steph. I forgot, lemme put up the top.”
He scuttled back to the driver’s side, leaned in and punched a button. Nothing happened. He fiddled with the control as the patter of rain turned into a downpour.
“Oh, my GOD!” she said.
“I don’t get it,” Josh muttered, knitting his brow.
She grabbed a magazine from her Gucci purse, feeling sheets of cold water soak her thin cotton dress.
He hit the control again, concentrating, as if mind would overcome matter.
“It’s supposed to work when the engine’s off.”
He kept pressing. Faster. Harder, like a compulsion.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” She got up, and strode to the back of the car, grabbing the leather convertible top and grimacing as she strained to pull it up.
He didn’t seem to see her, just kept his focus on the stupid button.
“Dammit, Josh. Leave it be! Help me!”
He looked back, hurried to the other side of the car. “Sorry, I–”
“Just shut the hell up and do something for God’s sake!”
He pulled, but the top wouldn’t budge. He bit his bottom lip so hard she thought he might draw blood, but nothing changed. Her hands we
re becoming slick as eels. Her ochre colored hair dangled over her eyes, obscuring her vision. Rivulets of water ran down the strands like tiny springs.
“This isn’t working. Get me an umbrella.”
He gaped at her. “I–I didn’t bring an umbrella.”
For a moment she stared at him, at the car, and then something snapped. “You didn’t bring a fucking umbrella?”
It felt good to let loose.
“You fucking feckless, unprepared hack. What the hell are we doing out here? Why did I even bother coming with you? You’re such a fucking loser you’d make Beck turn away in disgust. You try to impress me with your car and your friends, and you can’t even remember to gas up your malfunctioning, piece of shit pill box?” Her rage cascaded into a piercing, explosive yell. “What the fuck!”
He stood silent, blinking. Was he hurt? Was it the rain? She knew she should care, but she didn’t.
He finally threw his hands up and placed them atop his head.
“I’m sorry.” He stepped back to the middle of the road, looking everywhere for help.
“So, what are we gonna to do, genius?” she said, stabbing at him with each syllable, setting her fingers on her hips, gripping her wet clothing harder.
Josh sighed and turned away, walking to the other side of the lane. Exhaling again, hissing like a leaking balloon, he gritted his teeth and looked up at the sky.
“You know, Steph? I’ve had just about–”
He paused, furrowed his brow, and peered up the road.
“What…?”
“There’s a building…about a mile away.”
He snatched his expensive suit jacket and backpack from behind the seat.
“Come on!” His voice was filled with decisiveness and direction. “Grab what you want. We’ll leave the car here.”
He ran ahead, leaving her where she stood.
With little to do other than murmur, “Jesus Christ,” and bend over the car door, she gathered her magazines, pocketbook, Walkman, and a signed copy of Frederick Smith’s Gourd which she hadn’t opened, and never intended to read. She sighed and tried to follow as quickly as she could, but her Ferragamo heels made it difficult going in the rapidly hydrating muck. After a few paces spent sinking into the brown goop of the road, she gave up, removed them, and felt the mud ooze between her toes.
Horror Library, Volume 5 Page 26