Take care of her!
Dr. Mansfield’s words echoed in his head.
Mrs. Dupuis’s gnarled hand squeezed even harder, and he started to feel nauseous.
And that’s when the other—Dr. Shaw—made his play.
“No,” Andrew croaked, but it was too late.
“Yes,” Mrs. Dupuis replied. “Oh, yes.”
The man in the scrubs made a tsk, tsk, tsk sound out of the corner of his mouth, his eyes still locked on the nurse’s cart.
Looks like someone left a scalpel out. That’s a no-no. Don’t the nurses know that these patients are dangerous?
His eyes whipped back to Mrs. Dupuis’s prone, wrinkled form.
“Oh, I’ll fuck you alright,” Dr. Shaw said, his eyes twinkling. “And you’re going to love it.”
The man on the gurney moaned softly, drawing Dr. Shaw out of his reverie. He shook his head and wiped more sweat from his brow.
I’m close, he thought, staring at the man’s grafted limb. This time it will work. This time you’ll see. This time he will start acting differently, taking on his brother’s personality. You’ll see. I wasn’t always like this.
His scar began to itch again, but this time he resisted the urge to scratch.
There is someone in here with me…but he won’t be taking control anytime soon.
Chapter 19
“Open the fucking door. I’m warning you, lady, you don’t want to fuck with me.”
Cal was holding the crowbar out in front of him aggressively, but his hands were obviously trembling.
Justine didn’t move, didn’t even acknowledge his order.
“Did you hear me? I said, let him out of there. Now.”
Shelly had moved next to him, and he could feel her heart beating even though they were still several inches apart. It was causing her entire body to rock back and forth.
There was still no response; ever since the overweight nurse had turned away from the window of Robert’s room, she had said nothing. And yet, she was still smiling.
Cal took a step forward, raising the crowbar up even higher, making sure that even if the bitch was short-sighted she would see it now.
“I’m going to give you—”
A horrible roar, the same guttural, throaty growl, interrupted him.
Cal cringed and instinctively brought the crowbar closer to his body. Shelly was directly behind him now, her arms wrapping tightly around him. He tried to be brave, to be strong, but his hands were shaking so violently that the crowbar had become a blur.
What the fuck was that? And what in God’s name are we doing here?
But he knew what they were doing here…or, more specifically, what he was doing here.
For years, Cal had done his best to forget that feeling…the feeling that had coursed through him as he held his seven-year-old friend as he died, the boy’s blood soaking his arms and legs. How could he explain the feeling of absolute euphoria as his best friend’s quiddity left him? Better yet, how could he explain seeking this same feeling for over a decade? One that he could never quite replicate?
One that he had nearly forgotten about before Robert had begged him to come up to the Harlop Estate. On that day, it had all come flooding back.
Which was the real reason why he was here, in this place, the Seventh Ward, with a demented nurse, Robert locked in a cell, and promises to meet an undoubtedly cheery Dr. Shaw.
Another growl ripped through the hallway.
And that…there was that, too, whatever the fuck it was.
Cal shuddered.
“That’s George,” Justine said, as if reading his thoughts.
“Who the fuck is George?” Shelly spat.
The door at the far end of the hallway behind Justine suddenly burst open, banging loudly against the opposite wall. The nurse immediately stepped to one side as a hulking beast stepped through the opening.
“F-f-f-uck,” Cal moaned.
Shelly was still clinging to him, but he stumbled backward anyway, nearly knocking her over in the process.
The man was gigantic, nearly seven feet tall and thick through the chest and arms. But despite his impressive musculature, there was something slightly off about him. It was as if Cal was looking at the man’s reflection in a mirror that had been shattered: his face didn’t quite line up right, one leg looked longer than the other, and one forearm was only about half the size of the other. And he could have sworn that the man had a single, large breast hanging from the center of his chest.
Shelly cursed too, but the blood was so loud in Cal’s ears that he couldn’t hear exactly what she said.
“George, why don’t you bring our guests to their quarters?”
The man didn’t hesitate, he simply rushed toward them. Shelly remained frozen, but Cal was suddenly imbued with courage. As the man lumbered toward them, his gait awkward, his right leg lagging behind, he guided Shelly behind him again and stepped forward.
When the man came within striking distance, Cal swung the crowbar with an upward trajectory. But when he was within a foot, he got his first real good at the man, and all of his strength was suddenly sapped from him.
The man was stitched together like a jigsaw puzzle, pieces of rotting flesh sewn on his face, chest, and arms with thick, lace-like sutures.
It was Frankenstein’s monster in the flesh.
The crowbar struck the thing that Justine had called George, but it bounced harmlessly off his hard stomach. Vibrations shot up Cal’s forearms, and the crowbar fell from his hands.
The monster came to a stop and turned his stitched face to the ceiling and growled again.
Cal turned and ran.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that Shelly was running too, but his tunnel vision was so severe, his fear so palpable, that he couldn’t even see where she had gone.
As he sprinted toward the door to the Seventh Ward that they had come through, he found Shelly already standing there, her palms bashing into the push bar over and over again.
“Open the door!” he screamed. “Open the fucking door, Shelly!”
She didn’t turn; she simply continued to slam the bar with both hands.
“It. Won’t. Open,” she gasped.
Cal didn’t stop running; at the last second, Shelly moved to one side and Cal rammed into the door hands first.
Pain shot up his wrists as his hands were crumpled backward.
He cried out as he immediately dropped to the floor.
“Fuck!” Shelly yelled. She started to remove her backpack, but a voice caused her to freeze.
“Don’t kill them, George!” Justine’s tone was desperate. “Don’t kill them!”
Cal, still moaning from his smashed wrists, flipped onto his ass.
George was within a foot of him. As the massive beast leaned down until he was within inches of his face, Cal remained frozen in fear. The smell of rot and decay became so pungent that it made his eyes water, which thankfully obscured his view of the thick stitches, the mismatched skin tones that didn’t line up right, and the horrible gash that ran from the corner of his mouth nearly to his ear.
The smell intensified when the beast named George spoke.
“Welcome to the Seventh Ward, Cal,” the monster breathed.
Shelly said something to his left, but Cal was already spinning into a world of darkness.
Chapter 20
NINE YEARS AGO
“Wake up, George.”
Dr. Shaw leaned over the body, careful not to get too close in the event that the man on the gurney reacted as his brother had.
“George, it’s time to wake up.”
The man didn’t stir, inciting a frown from Dr. Shaw.
What’s going on? He should be waking now…he’s been under so many times that he should have built up a tolerance by now. Unless…
“Nurse, how much nitrous did you give him?”
Justine turned to look at him, her face a lumpy, purple mess. He wasn’t sure how she had
managed to quiet George’s twin, but it couldn’t have been easy. Her nose was broken high on the bridge, she had a shiner under her left eye, and her lips, normally thin bordering on nonexistent, were swollen and split.
And yet the blood on her hands didn’t appear to be her own.
Dr. Shaw should have been more specific; he should have told Justine to shut the man up without killing him, which was a distinct possibility given the complete and utter silence in the rest of the ward.
Still, he could deal with that later. His most pressing concern now was the man on the table before.
The one he had named George after his late mentor.
“I gave him same as last time,” Justine replied with a shrug.
A thin trail of blood trickled out of her right nostril, and she sniffed before wiping it away with the back of her hand.
Dr. Shaw turned back to his patient.
The man, like his brother, was completely nude, but unlike his brother, his leg wasn’t the only thing that had been altered.
George was a mismatch of nearly a dozen individuals that he and Justine had lured into the Seventh Ward over the past few months.
His left ear belonged to a bus driver whose phone had died—thank God for shitty, irreplaceable phone batteries. Justine had managed to convince the man to come around side of the hospital under the pretext of using her cellphone.
George’s right arm was from a vagrant that they had found sleeping outside the hospital. Enticing him inside had been even easier than the bus driver; all they’d had to do was leave the door ajar, and on a particularly cold night the man had come to them. They had tried to sew a prostitute’s cheek to George’s face, but that didn’t work; no matter what they did, no matter what kind of glue or stitches they applied, it just wouldn’t keep. Now George was left with a horrible scar that Dr. Shaw had done his best to suture. Problem was, every time the man opened his mouth, the wound reopened.
It didn’t matter; after all, George wasn’t winning a beauty contest anytime soon—that wasn’t what his role was. Instead, they had opted to suture one of the prostitute’s breasts to his chest. That part had been Justine’s favorite, and he could have sworn that the woman had become aroused, her fat face flushing, her breath coming in shallow bursts.
And, of course, there was the most recent addition: his twin brother’s leg. Dr. Shaw hoped that the fact that it was from his twin would help facilitate the healing process.
With each new addition, George started to change, and it wasn’t only the increasingly pungent reek of rot. His personality became less cohesive, more reactive, bestial even.
There’s someone inside me.
Dr. Shaw grabbed one of many damp cloths that had been used for the surgery and moved to the head of the gurney again. He pressed the cloth against the man’s hot forehead and his eyes fluttered. A thin smile crossed his lips.
Without warning, George sputtered, then coughed. A brown sludge came flowing out of his mouth, and Dr. Shaw tilted the man’s head to one side to make sure he didn’t choke on it.
“Ah, I see that you are coming around,” Dr. Shaw said. He couldn’t help the massive grin that formed on his face. George may have been hideous, feverish, and weak, but he was alive. Which was progress, given what had happened with the others. Unlike the bus driver, vagrant, and prostitute, it had been an incredible risk luring George and his brother into the Seventh Ward. But the twins were exactly what Dr. Shaw was looking for: strong men, muscular men, men who could sustain and recover from multiple surgeries.
In the end, it had been worth it.
We’re close.
George’s eyes opened, and they shifted back and forth so quickly that Dr. Shaw feared that he was having a seizure. But after a few seconds they focused, and Dr. Shaw heard the exact same words that the man’s brother had uttered more than an hour ago.
“What have you done to me?” George whispered.
Dr. Shaw ran a finger over the suture webbing on the man’s cheek like a gentle caress. He could see the man’s molars in the gash when he spoke, which was strange but at the same time very fascinating.
“Just trying to make you whole again, George. Just trying to make you whole.”
George’s face contorted in pain, and the several of the stitches that marked his shaved scalp and ran over his patchwork ear split. Blood slowly started to trickle from the wound.
“George? Who the—” He coughed again, bringing up more brown sludge. “—who the fuck is George? I’ve told you a hundred times, that’s not my name.”
Dr. Shaw shushed him.
“You need to relax…you need to heal so that I can show you to the world. So I can prove to them that I was right—prove to Dr. Mansfield that I was right all along.”
As he stared down at the man on the gurney, he thought he saw tears begin to form in George’s wide, brown eyes. Staring into those eyes, Dr. Shaw wondered what it would be like to transplant one of his brother’s blue eyes.
“What did you do to me?” George whispered again, wetness spilling down his cheeks.
Dr. Shaw smiled.
Chapter 21
Robert banged against the thick glass, but all this accomplished was to make his fist sore. He could see a thing—a lumbering giant of a man—rushing toward Cal and Shelly, and then he saw Cal hit him in the chest with his crowbar. The beast roared, and then his friends turned and ran. Robert pressed his face against the small window, trying desperately to keep his eye on them, to see what that thing was doing to them, but eventually they disappeared and he was left with only a view of Justine, standing there, that fucking smile plastered on her face.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Hey! Leave them alone!”
Robert yelled until his throat was raw, but it was no use; either Justine couldn’t hear him, or she simply chose to ignore him. Crying now, Robert whipped around, splaying the flashlight around the room, looking for something—anything—that he might use to tear the thick metal door off its hinges.
There was nothing.
The gurney was covered in sheets soaked with what he assumed was long-dried blood, and there was a chair in the corner upon which he had thrown the cheap stuffed bunny on. The rest of the room was completely empty.
Robert collapsed on his knees, overcome with guilt and shame.
He was the reason why Shelly and Cal were here; he was the reason why they were about to be torn apart by that monster—or worse.
It might take them to the Marrow with it.
And he had a nagging feeling in the back of his mind that their experience wouldn’t be the euphoria he had felt watching the gentle, rolling waves.
You have been chosen, Sean had said once.
Robert had no idea why, but he had a sneaking suspicion that was one of the reasons why he had gone and managed to come back. Maybe it was because he had spent so much time with Amy’s quiddity. Or maybe it was something else entirely.
He didn’t know.
He had no idea how or why he had come back from the one place that it was universally agreed upon that you could never return from.
He didn’t know anything.
“Goddammit,” he whispered, pounding his thighs with his fists. “Goddammit.”
His flashlight flickered, and he instinctively shut it off, trying to save the dwindling battery power for when he might need it—if he needed it.
The irony of being locked in a cell for the mentally deranged as confusion washed over him was not lost on Robert.
And maybe he was insane. Maybe his wife and daughter dying had sent him on a spiral of insanity—his way of dealing with the loss. Maybe all of this—everything that had happened since—was simply a figment of his imagination.
But then he remembered Cal and Shelly. Real or not, he couldn’t sit idly by while they were torn apart. He had to do something…anything.
Robert brought himself to his feet and slowly moved back to the doorway and peered out.
Justine was still there, but she
was no longer staring ahead. Instead, she appeared distracted by something behind her.
It was Cal and Shelly.
They were walking side by side, their heads hung low, their feet shuffling.
What are they doing? Why are they coming back this way? Why didn’t they run away?
His friends were moving toward what he suspected was a door on the other side of the hallway, one that was just out of his line of sight.
Tears were streaming down his cheeks now.
Why—?
But then Robert saw it again, and his breath caught in his throat.
It was indeed a man, or at least it had been at one point. Revulsion struck Robert like a punch to the solar plexus as he observed its patchwork skin, the breast in the center of its chest, the lopsided head and ear. It was as if it had been stitched together by some demented doctor.
Dr. Shaw is waiting for you.
Robert swallowed hard.
“Hey,” he shouted, pounding on the glass again, this time with both fists. “Hey! Leave them—”
But a whisper from behind him cut him off.
“They can’t hear you.” The female voice was airy and hoarse, not unlike how Ruth Harlop’s had been.
All of the blood drained from his face.
“This place…this place is meant to keep people in. Banging on the window won’t help you.”
Robert turned on his heels, while at the same time fiddling with the flashlight, trying to turn it on. The simple button, however, suddenly seemed to exceed his dexterity.
It was as if his hands were covered in thick mittens.
“No! No don’t—please, Daddy, don’t turn on the light.”
Again, Robert froze. The voice was coming from the same location, but it was different—a child’s voice.
The image of Amy, of the way she was in the photograph in her pocket, came to him then, and he swallowed hard.
It can’t be.
But when the voice spoke again, it had changed once again into something else.
The Seventh Ward (The Haunted Book 2) Page 10