3 TERRIFYING THRILLERS

by Jude Hardin

  “What’s that?”

  “That the mother of the aborted child is next. We need to find her and warn her, place her in protective custody or something.”

  “I’ve put out an A.P.B. on the BMW,” Richardson said. “They’ll find the guy and lock him up. I’m sure of that. Tomorrow’s another day, my friend. I can’t just keep going all night. I have to get some rest.”

  “Drop me off at Dr. Bratcher’s office, then.”

  “What for?”

  “I need to locate the mother. Her records should be there.”

  “You’re going to break into his office?”

  “Yes.”

  “How will you know what to look for?”

  “The entity’s name is Lori Lorry. That’s what she said in the email. I’ll just look through Dr. Bratcher’s records until I find a patient with the same last name.”

  “This is insane,” Richardson said. “I can’t be any part of a breaking and entering. You know the alarm will go off and the cops will come and arrest you, right?”

  “I’ll have to work fast,” John said.

  “I could arrest you right now.”

  “But you won’t.”

  Richardson took his police hat off and climbed into the driver’s seat of his car. John got in the other side. Richardson wrote CALL ABOUT SEPTIC TANK on his to-do list.

  “I’m not taking you to Dr. Bratcher’s office,” Richardson said.

  “Just drop me somewhere nearby. Don’t worry, I’m not going to implicate you if I get busted. This is something I have to do. Too many lives have been lost already.”

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this shit.” Richardson slammed the car into reverse and hauled ass out of Dr. Theodore Bratcher’s driveway.

  On the way back to town, word came over the radio that the stolen BMW had been located.

  It had been found on fire at the bottom of a rocky cliff.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Jana Lorry had never told her parents about the abortion. It would have upset them greatly to know that their little girl, their only child, had gotten knocked-up from a one night stand in a car. Jana had decided to spare them the shame, and herself the endless lectures. She sat at the dinner table with them now, picking at her food, acid rising in her throat at the sight of it.

  “Why aren’t you eating?” Dad said.

  “Just not hungry.”

  “You been stashing Snicker’s bars in your room again?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s wrong? Your mother went to a lot of trouble to fix this nice dinner for us.”

  Jana rose abruptly then, and a malodorous translucent green cone of liquid shot from her mouth like a fire hose. The roast beef and the salad and the mashed potatoes and the corn got doused with what seemed like gallons of the vile spray.

  Jana fell to the floor and thrashed wildly as John Rock thanked Sergeant Bryan Richardson for the ride and got out of his car.

  Decorative concrete retaining blocks lined the flowerbeds leading to Dr. Theodore Bratcher’s office. John Rock picked one up and heaved it through Dr. Theodore Bratcher’s plate glass door. No alarm sounded, but John figured a signal had alerted the authorities silently. He walked in and flipped a light switch and found Jana Lorry’s manila folder in the alphabetized shelves behind the receptionist’s station. He did this in less than two minutes. He ducked back through the shattered doorway and ran, trying his best to stay in the shadows until he made it to Dairy Queen half a mile away. He woofed down a cheeseburger and fries and scanned the information in Jana’s medical record. He saw where she lived. He waited for a taxi to take him there while Jana convulsed violently on the dining room floor.

  Blood-tinged foam oozed from the spaces between her clenched teeth.

  “Oh my God!” Mom shouted. “Call nine-one-one! Call nine-one-one!”

  Although she had lost control of her body, Jana was acutely aware of everything going on around her. She heard her mother going ape-shit, and she heard her father talking to the emergency dispatcher.

  “Yes, she’s breathing. She’s definitely breathing…no, she’s never had a seizure before…I know she’s not choking, because she never took one bite of her food…”

  Dad continued talking until the ambulance arrived. He spoke briefly with the Emergency Medical Technicians before they started an IV and administered some medicine that made Jana very happy and stopped her spastic movements. They strapped her to a board, lifted her onto a stretcher, and loaded her into the ambulance.

  “Follow them,” John Rock said to the cabby.

  John needed to approach the hospital gradually, the way a scuba diver hovers at a certain depth to avoid decompression syndrome. He paid for the taxi and got out a couple of blocks away, the activity there at the Poltergeist Hotel already buzzing his brain like a swarm of angry hornets.

  By the time he made it to the emergency room entrance, John had the mother of all headaches. Motherfucker was more like it. Someone had buried an ice pick into the back of his skull, and he wasn’t sure he could carry on. He approached the information desk. His vision was blurred and he was unable to make out the attendant’s nametag.

  “I’m looking for a young lady named Jana Lorry,” he said. “Brought in by rescue.”

  The clerk keyed the name into her computer. “Are you family?” she asked.

  “Yes.” John lied.

  “Are you the father?”

  He didn’t want to press his luck. “I’m her uncle,” he said.

  “You can have a seat in the waiting area. She’s being evaluated right now. Looks like they’re probably going to admit her to the neuro unit on the ninth floor.”

  “Thanks. How will I know?”

  “Check back with me in half an hour. I should be able to tell you something by then.”

  “Okay.”

  John walked to the waiting area and sat on one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs. He was surrounded by people in various states of misery. There was a man in a basketball uniform with an ice pack on his ankle, and a very large woman retching into a pink plastic basin. There were sniffles and sneezes, cuts and abrasions, aches and pains, rashes and insect bites and upset stomachs. These were the folks on the back burner who sat in the ER for hours waiting to be seen. John figured most of them had no money and no insurance. When they needed a doctor, this is where they came.

  He felt sorry for them, but truth be known he wasn’t feeling too chipper himself. The paranormal activity was overwhelming. It was a like listening to a thousand transistor radios tuned to a thousand different frequencies. Psychedelic splotches danced in front of his eyes, and his head felt like a balloon filled with too much helium. He was determined to help Jana Lorry, but he had to get out of there. At least for a few minutes. He got up and staggered a few feet toward the exit, and then all six-foot-five and two hundred twenty pounds of him hit the deck like a sack of hammers. He woke up in a bed with clean white sheets and an IV drip and a flat screen television tuned to Gilligan’s Island.

  That Gilligan. What a fuckup. John found the remote and switched off the TV and then mashed the red button to summons the nurse.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A disembodied voice from somewhere inside the wall said, “May I help you?”

  “Where am I?” John said.

  “You’re in the hospital, sir.”

  “I figured that. What floor am I on? What’s the room number?”

  “I’ll come and talk to you in a minute.”

  Ten minutes passed, and finally a woman wearing a lab coat and a stethoscope walked in carrying a clipboard.

  “I’m Dr. Sircar,” she said.

  She had dark skin and dark eyes and long black hair and she spoke with an accent.

  “I’m John Rock. Would you mind telling me what floor I’m on?”

  “You’re on the ninth floor. This is the neurology unit, and I’m the neurology resident on call. I would like to talk to you about your CT scan.”

 
“You did a CT scan?”

  “In the emergency room. I’m afraid you have quite a large tumor in your brain, Mr. Rock.”

  “I do?”

  “It appears to be benign, but we will need to do further tests to know for sure.”

  “What kind of tests?”

  “I’m going to order an MRI, and I’m going to consult neurosurgery to remove the tumor and biopsy it.”

  “You’re going to cut into my brain?”

  “We need to remove the tumor. It’s about the size of a robin’s egg right now, and it caused you to blackout earlier. If it gets any larger, it could start causing many more neurological problems.”

  John Rock didn’t tell her, but he had known about the tumor for a long time. It had been the size of a robin’s egg thirty years ago. It hadn’t grown. The extreme paranormal activity at the hospital had caused him to pass out, not the tumor.

  But he was on the ninth floor, and that’s where he wanted to be.

  “I’ll agree to the MRI,” John said. “But I’ll have to think about the surgery.”

  “I understand it’s a frightening prospect, but I think it’s the best thing.”

  “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Very well. I would like to examine you now, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She checked John’s eyes with a penlight and performed a series of reflex tests. She listened to his heart with her stethoscope. When she finished, John asked her what kind of medicine they had prescribed for him. She looked at her clipboard and named four different drugs. They had administered the medications intravenously, and would start giving them to him by mouth now that he was awake. He didn’t know which one had done the trick, but the barrage of supernatural static responsible for his collapse had practically disappeared. He was able to focus now.

  A few minutes after the doctor left the room, John got up and pushed his IV pole through the door and into the hallway. He was in 904, at the end of the hall. There was a big window and he could see one of the parking areas nine stories below and the downtown skyline. Directly across from him was room 903, and to his right 905. He walked toward the nurses’ station, peeking into any doors that were open, trying to find a woman who might be Jana Lorry’s age.

  No luck.

  An attractive blonde in blue scrubs walked his way carrying a large syringe.

  “Can I help you?” she said.

  “Just taking a little walk,” John said. “Is that for me?”

  “This is for another patient, but I’m your nurse tonight. My name is Amanda.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “You’re on fall precautions, so you really shouldn’t be walking around. You need to go on back to your room and stay in bed for now.”

  “I’m all right. I’ll be careful.”

  She frowned. “I’ll have to chart your non-compliance.”

  “Chart whatever you want to.”

  She huffed on down the hallway and turned into room 902.

  On a wall behind the nurses’ station there was a grid drawn on a whiteboard. It listed the rooms in order, the patients’ initials, the nurses and aides assigned, and pending procedures. 904, John’s room, said RJ | AMANDA | TINA | MRI.

  RJ. Rock, John. So the initials were listed backwards. Maybe as an extra measure to protect confidentiality. He scanned the grid. Room 915 said LJ | VICTORIA | MARVIN | EEG.

  LJ. Lorry, Jana. It had to be her. John walked that way. 915 and 904 were at opposite ends of the hall. There was a big window by 915 as well, but the facade of the building next door blocked any sort of view. John sat on a padded bench and pretended to gaze out at nothing. With a sideward glance he could see Jana lying in her bed and a middle-aged man and a slightly younger woman standing there talking. Mom and Dad, John supposed. Jana’s wrists and ankles had been strapped to the bed frame with padded cuffs.

  “We’re going home now, sweetheart,” Dad said. “But we’ll be back first thing in the morning.

  “Fuck you,” Jana said.

  It was not the voice of a young woman. It was the deep, “everywhere” voice John had heard from Sam Keller in the interrogation room.

  It was the voice of Lori Lorry, the entity, the aborted baby girl.

  John debated over whether or not to approach Jana’s parents and explain the situation to them. He decided not to. He stayed on the bench and watched them walk down the hallway and turn toward the elevators.

  It was always tricky trying to convince parents that their child was possessed. Nobody wanted to believe it. They wanted to believe in science. They wanted to believe in doctors and medicine and expensive diagnostic tests.

  But John Rock knew for a fact that some things in this world simply could not be explained scientifically. Lori Lorry was one of those things.

  John walked into Jana’s room. Her eyes were bloodshot, her lips swollen and cracked and bleeding. There was a bottle of Evian drinking water on the bedside table. John unscrewed the top and held the bottle to Jana’s mouth. She took a long drink and then forcefully expelled all of it into John’s face. He wiped himself with some paper towels and sat in the chair beside the bed.

  “Hello, Lori,” he said.

  “Fuck you.”

  “It’s time for you to leave Jana alone. It’s time for you to follow the light and break on through to the other side. I can help you.”

  “You’re an idiot. You think you know things, but you don’t know shit.”

  “I know you’re very angry, and I understand why. But you have to let it go. Revenge is not the answer.”

  She whinnied like a horse. “I killed the others, and I’m going to kill this bitch, too. But first I’m going to fuck you in the ass with that water bottle.”

  “Look at me. It’s over. I’m stronger than you are, and—”

  The door slammed shut and the temperature dropped dramatically. John started shivering. He could see his breath. He grabbed a blanket from the mini-closet and wrapped it around his shoulders. It didn’t help. He was going to freeze to death if he didn’t get out of there. He reached for the doorknob, and a sizzling arc of electrical current shot through his body like a million scorpion stings. He fell to the floor.

  The abrupt and forceful movement stretched his IV tubing and yanked the needle out of his arm. Bright red blood oozed from the site in a steady flow. He grabbed a washcloth and put pressure on the wound, but the blood kept coming. He couldn’t stop it. The terrycloth rag became saturated in a matter of seconds. Now a pair of thoroughbreds named Hypothermia and Exsanguination ran neck and neck in a stakes race for John Rock’s life. And down the stretch they go!

  John took an entire roll of toilet paper from a shelf in the bathroom and pressed it against his bleeding arm. He looked at himself in the mirror. He had black circles under his eyes, and his face looked as though it had been sculpted from raw dough. His teeth were chattering and, on top of everything else, the medication the neurologist had given him was starting to wear off. He figured he might have five minutes before another blizzard of spirits whirled into his consciousness and rendered him helpless again.

  He looked at his arm. The bleeding had finally slowed to a trickle. He came out of the bathroom and when he turned the corner he saw that Jana had broken her restraints and was hovering three feet above the mattress. In all his years as a medium, John had never seen anything like it. He wondered if he was dreaming. His vision was blurred and his head hurt and he felt like he might pass out any second.

  “Now you will die,” Lori Lorry said.

  Jana fell to the bed like a discarded marionette. A red fog rose from her body and took the shape of an enormous human fetus. The skull had been crushed and the hands were missing and the limbs dangled at impossible angles. The face wore a tortured and perpetual scream. The entire apparition appeared to be coated with a clear viscous fluid that dripped into the air and evaporated immediately. There was a thunderous boom and suddenly John could feel the entity inside him, twisting
his gut and squeezing his heart and frying his eyeballs with a soldering iron. He tried to shout but could not make a sound. He tried to run but was completely paralyzed. The door flew open and a hurricane rushed in and sucked John Rock into the hallway and hurled him through the window. He crashed through in slow motion, every fiber of his being in excruciating pain.

  He submitted to defeat and allowed himself to go slack, knowing he would never survive the nine-story fall, but the hospital’s twin towers were connected by a walkway on the eighth floor and John landed on the flat metal roof of the walkway. He knew he’d suffered some scrapes and cuts and bruises, but he didn’t think he’d broken any bones. He could move all his extremities.

  Lightning flashed amidst swirling clouds the color of molten lead. The horrible apparition hovered above John, and he figured she would streak down now and finish him off. He had no way to escape, and the vicious entity could not be reasoned with.

  As he waited for the end to come, hoping it would be quick and painless, another apparition appeared, this one in the shape of a very old woman.

  “Who are you?” Lori Lorry asked.

  “My name is Mildred,” the old lady said. “I’ve been here over sixty years. I was the very first person to die in this hospital, which makes me queen of the hill. We cannot tolerate this sort of behavior here, Lori. I’ll have to ask you to move along now.”

  “I’m not leaving till the bitch is dead, and I’m going to make sure she feels plenty of pain in the meantime.”

  “Jana is your mother. Your souls are connected in ways you don’t understand. If you harm her, you will harm yourself, and that harm will be irreparable.”

  Lori’s voice changed to that of a little girl. “She murdered me. All I wanted was to live and grow and laugh and walk in the sunshine and wear pretty dresses and eat jellybeans.”

  “You’ll have your chance to do all those things,” Mildred said. “You will have many more chances to be born. This just wasn’t the right time. Follow the light now, and your time will come again. If you kill Jana—”

  “Why don’t you follow the light?” Lori asked.