“Oh, you like it rough, eh?” he said, and used his hands to hold my shoulders tight against the seat of the car. One of the seat belts biting into my back, my shoulders, his weight pinning me down.
“No, I—” I tried to close my legs but he was there, between my thighs. Holding them apart with his legs. Pressing against me, forcing himself into me, more and more. “Stop, please—”
But he didn’t. Not yet. Not then. And God how it hurt.
And finally, finally when he stopped, as I yanked my panties back on, filled with shame and pain and embarrassment, he stroked the side of my face and said, “We can try again later. And if it hurts you too much again, we can stop.”
I’d jerked away from him, stunned. Lost. Confused. What had happened? Maybe he didn’t know. Didn’t know I didn’t want it. Maybe I hadn’t been assertive enough, loud enough, obvious enough. Maybe it was my fault. Because, after all, if it had been . . . had been that, would he have stopped? Would he be sitting here beside me, looking at me like that and acting so nice?
Oh, you like it rough, eh?
His words echo in my mind, in my memory. Back in the present, I slam my fist into my thigh. That time it had seemed possible, possible if not probable that he hadn’t known, that he’d lost control or it had been my fault somehow. Today, what happened in the showers, it felt calculated and premeditated. Though my heart ached for what he’d done to me in his car, I’d not felt the same icy thrill of dread go through me then that had filled me in the showers.
No. Something had changed. The only thing that made sense, as impossible as it would sound to anyone else, was if the camera was somehow to blame.
For what happened today, anyway.
I rise from the floor on legs which feel as watery as if I’d finished an incredibly long run and make my way over to the computer. I sink into the chair gratefully and begin to search. I’m not ready to face the world yet, and since I’m in a library, maybe I can get some answers. The haunted hospital would be the best place to start. There had to be something about its history here somewhere.
Chapter Fifteen
SEVREN AND I sit cross-legged and facing each other on my bed. A small bowl of potato chips is between us and I’m holding a thick sheath of papers in my hands. “It’s all here,” I say. “You’re not going to believe this.” I hope I’m wrong.
“Believe what?”
I grin. It feels good. The best I’ve felt all day. Maybe I am losing it, but if so, I’m not the only one. I’d spent the morning in the library printing out newspaper articles from the internet and photocopying pages from books. I’d looked into the history of the haunted hospital as well as myths about cameras and souls. When I’d met Sevren for lunch, sneaking around like a criminal to avoid running into anyone whose photograph I’d taken, I’d hinted I would have something exciting to show him this evening.
If anyone will believe me, it is Sevren. He’s the one who had asked for, and received, a Ouija board for his twelfth birthday. He’s the one who had read my tarot cards over and over again until he had the meaning of each card memorized and could do the readings without checking his reference books. He is the one who always wants to watch horror movies on our movie night, and who is completely superstitious about everything from black cats and ladders to the number thirteen and broken mirrors.
Still, sitting here on my bed, with my research in hand, my happiness is tempered by nerves because if Sevren doesn’t believe me, it’s because I really am in trouble.
I start with the softball. “What if I told you that Dr. Woods really did exist?”
Sevren lifts one eyebrow, then shrugs and pops a potato chip into his mouth. He chews it noisily and then speaks, even before he’s swallowed. “I wouldn’t be very surprised. Most urban legends like that come from some sort of reality. People take real events and pad them with supernatural twists and brutal details to make the stories even better, scarier.”
“God.” I roll my eyes, the excitement and dread I feel not diminished at all by Sevren’s mundane tone of voice and lack of surprise. “You sound like a teacher.”
“What? You asked.”
“I did, but did you have to make it sound so boring?” I don’t wait for a reply before I charge forward. “So, yeah. I was doing some research in the library today—”
“Why? When did you have time for that?”
“I skipped gym.”
“You skipped—”
“Look, if you keep interrupting me, I’m never going to have a chance to tell you what I found.”
Sevren makes an expansive gesture, scoops up a handful of chips, and leans back on my bed to listen.
“Right,” I say again. “So, Dr. Woods was real.”
“Right.”
“The hospital was closed years ago after a riot broke out. It was huge. The whole city was shut down for blocks and blocks around, and everyone was evacuated but none of the patients actually escaped the psych ward. None of them even seemed to try. Instead,” I dramatically set down a handful of photocopies of old newspaper articles I’d found online. “All the patients who escaped their rooms stampeded to Dr. Woods’ office where they tortured him. For days and days.”
That gets Sevren’s attention. I can tell by the way he stops mechanically feeding chip after chip into his mouth and looks down at the articles. His eyes scan back and forth, reading the headlines, taking in the grainy photograph of the hospital looking very much like it does today, minus the boarded-up windows, that are front and centre on the first article.
“When the army finally broke in, the army, they found the doctor in his office. He was alive, and the article doesn’t go into too many details, but this,” I say, slapping down another newspaper article, this one a smaller snippet that had been hidden away in the back pages of a newspaper rather than on the front page like the others, “this implies that he was skinned alive, at least partially. Skinned. Alive.”
“That’s brutal.” Sevren spins the paper around so it’s right side up for him, upside down for me.
“He, the doctor, he died shortly afterward. Not surprising if he really was skinned alive. I mean, can you imagine? How do you even treat someone without skin?”
Sevren curls his nose up and shakes his head. “It’s—I mean, that’s pretty hardcore right there.”
“Right? Which, I mean, that sort of implies they had a reason to hate the doctor, right? Like maybe he’d been performing experiments on them, like the stories say?”
“Maybe. Or maybe they were dudes who weren’t particularly nice guys and they really wanted to hurt the person who kept them locked up.”
“But that doesn’t explain this,” I drop down another couple newspaper articles. These ones describe the conditions authorities had found in the hospitals that, coupled with the riot and the protests around the city at harbouring such dangerous people in their neighbourhoods, had the hospital shut down.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
I kinda am. Part of me is squicked out about the things I am sharing and nervous about where my story is leading to, but part of me, the part that loves true crime podcasts, is in my element. It doesn’t hurt that I feel a bit like the star of an old black and white movie, complete with spinning newspaper graphics and disembodied voices shouting, “Extra! Extra!”
“Kinda,” I admit and point down to the part of the article which describes a suite of rooms in the psych ward. A suite of rooms where it looked like there had been recent surgeries performed, even though all the patients’ serious medical care was done in other parts of the hospital. “But look at that.”
Sevren picks up the page, flips his hair out of his face, and reads it. I snatch up a handful of chips and pop them in my mouth, enjoying the look on Sevren’s face while he reads.
“Well,” he says, dropping the paper back into the stack with the rest. “What did the patients say when they asked them?”
“Aww, you’re skipping ahead,” I say, flipping through m
y pages to pull out the Wikipedia article I’d found about the Westwood hospital riot. “Look here.”
“. . . all the psychiatric patients were deceased when authorities entered that ward. Autopsies were inconclusive,” Sevren reads aloud. “For real?”
“For real,” I nod. “I had to dig to find a newspaper article to confirm it, which is weird, but yeah, it’s all right here.” I drop a photocopy down and point to the paragraph I’d highlighted.
“It’s not so weird, I guess,” Sevren says, reading it and shrugging. “Media was probably different then. Average people weren’t exposed to as much as we are—maybe the papers thought they were protecting them from the worst of the details. And they could, too, it’s not like Twitter was around to spread information.”
“Ohh, look who’s so smart,” I say, laughing. “I like your theory better than mine.”
“What was yours?”
“That they figured it was a bunch of crazy people and it didn’t matter what happened to them. Or that it served them right.”
“Well, it could have been a bit of both.”
“Because people suck,” I say.
“Sometimes . . .” Sevren gestures at the stack of pages still in my hands. “So what’s in there?”
“More details about the hospital’s history. It’s a pretty colourful one.”
“More colourful than,” Sevren looks down at the article to confirm the number, “thirty-seven patients dead for no explainable reason and a doctor who was skinned alive?”
“Well, maybe not so elaborately grotesque as all that, but still colourful.”
I spread the pages, all but the last one in my hand, out on the bed in a great big fan. Most of them are photocopies from newspaper archives, some are printouts from blogs about haunted or historical locations, a bunch are from urban exploration websites, some from Alberta Mental Health, and finally some more from Wikipedia. Taken all together they paint a graphic and violent picture.
“Ever since the hospital was in the midst of being built it’s been . . . troubled.” I point to an article about a murder on the construction site where one worker pushed another off some scaffolding. “And it goes on and on from there. People killing each other, hurting each other . . .”
I shuffle through the printouts until I find the page I’m looking for. A government report, looking totally official with a coat of arms on the top of the page and everything. “This says they were thinking about closing the hospital down even before the riot because the people who got locked up in there never got rehabilitated. Ever. In fact, they all got worse.”
“They all got worse?”
“Every single one of them.”
“That’s probably weird.”
I laugh, “Probably.”
Sevren keeps looking through all the pages, all the evidence I’ve managed to gather that something is wrong with the hospital, that it might be haunted, or possessed, or something. Historical reports, newspaper clippings, and information about the riot. Even more modern-day reports. Reports of women being attacked on the hospital grounds, of teenagers hurt exploring the ruins. I’d included a few copies of newspaper articles about the fire last year even though I know Sevren knows all about it because he, like me, had watched the firefighters at work, had seen the smoke pouring out from around the boards on the windows. There was even a crime map I’d printed up from the city’s website which showed, quite clearly, that violent crimes around our neighbourhood, around the hospital, were four times higher than crime rates a few blocks away.
I watch him in silence, waiting to see his response. I’m not even sure what reaction I want, truth be told, but I want to see what he’s going to do with all the information I’ve given him, then I’ll judge whether or not to share the last bit, to drop the bombshell that will either shift our paradigm or make him think I need to be fitted for a straightjacket.
I’m not ready for the latter to happen. Sevren is my only friend. The only person I trust, who understands me. The idea he might think I’ve lost my grip on reality makes the breath go out of my lungs and my belly twist and churn, but I have to tell someone. If what I suspect is true, I need to do something about it. I can’t be responsible, even in part, for hurting people. Not without wanting to fix it.
Sevren reads. And he reads. And then he reads some more. I wait. I pick up some chips, then put them back in the bowl again uneaten. I pick at my fingernails and fidget with the sheet of paper in my hands. Still Sevren reads.
“So . . .” I prompt when I can’t possibly hold it back any longer. “What do you think?”
“I think,” Sevren says, looking up at me with a smirk. “I think that if you put half as much work into your English assignments as you did coming up with all this, you wouldn’t have gotten a C on your report about The Tempest.”
I slap him playfully on the shoulder and laugh. I can hear my nerves in it, it’s shaky and thin. “But really?”
“I don’t know, Morgan,” Sevren says, leaning back in the bed and shoving forward the last sheet of paper he’d been reading. “What do you want me to think? I think it’s cool, but I don’t know what to do with it beyond that. What are you going to do with it? Write a story?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I just . . . I feel like there’s something here, you know? Something that needs to be discovered or—”
“And does that have something to do with the page in your hand?” Sevren asks, gesturing at it with his chin.
“It might?” I say. “I’m not—you’re going to think I’m crazy.”
“Nah,” he says, grinning and flipping his hair back. “I’m pretty sure about that already. Go ahead and give me the proof.”
“First of all,” I say. “Do you believe the hospital might be haunted? Like, for real?”
“It might be. I don’t see why not. I’m not exactly sure I believe one hundred percent in ghosts,” he says. “But I don’t disbelieve either. I think when we leave this world we leave something behind . . . that could be ghosts. I also think it’s possible this world butts up against other ones and sometimes things leak through. So anything is possible. If a place were going to be haunted, Westwood Hospital is a prime target I’d think, given all this stuff you’ve found.”
“See, that’s what I think,” I say, brightening. Maybe he won’t be looking to get me committed after all. “And, well—” I look at the page in my hand and then, with a sigh, set it down on the pile of other pages, face up.
Sevren looks at it, then at me. He raises one pierced eyebrow and picks it up. “You think the camera you found there is . . .”
“I don’t know if it’s stealing souls exactly,” I say, the words tumbling out like stones in an avalanche. They roll over each other, gaining momentum as they go. “I don’t know what it’s doing, but see how that article says some cultures believe a photograph steals your soul? What if they’re right, or what if, I dunno, what if the camera changes you somehow?”
“I mean, all this stuff you found out about the hospital is interesting and everything, but . . . it’s a bit of a stretch to go from there to thinking your camera can, like, steal people’s souls.”
“I know that,” I say, backtracking a bit. “I’m not just basing this on the fact I found the camera there, but—”
“Because Marcus had to go after you took his picture? I mean, that’s pretty weak—”
“He didn’t just go, Sevren. You don’t understand. You weren’t there. He changed. There was a gleam in his eyes, then we took the picture and it was gone.”
“Uh-huh. Maybe he realised what time it was and had to get going.”
“If it was only him I might think you are right, but it wasn’t. There was the squirrel—”
“The one you thought had rabies.” He couldn’t sound more sceptical if he tried.
“Well, it had something weird going on anyway. It was fine one moment, then I took its picture and suddenly it was aggressive and weird.”
“Okay, so Marc
us and a squirrel. Still pretty weak, Morgan.”
“And Stacy.”
“What about Stacy?” he asks.
“After I took her picture in the hallway today,” I say, and then pause. I dig the photo out of my backpack and set it on top of all the papers to refresh Sevren’s memory. Stacy, Keith, and Simon are only ones whose faces are visible in it. Behind Stacy we can see Xia’s shoulder, but aside from that every other person has their back to the camera. I tap Stacy with my finger, my ragged fingernail in odd contrast to her perfectly put-together look. “After I took her picture she called me a . . . a slut.”
Even saying the word is hard. That single syllable awkward on my tongue and harsh to my ears. I cringe, but continue. “I bumped into her in the hallway, and she called me a . . . that. She called me that.” I’m working hard not to cry.
Sevren frowns, then tilts his head a little bit and frowns even deeper. “I . . . that’s not okay, Morgan.”
“I know.” I don’t want to dwell on that part, I want to tell him everything I need to tell him. I want to convince him I’m not crazy. “We’ve been in a good place lately so this came out of nowhere. Right after I took her picture with the camera.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Sevren says after a long pause. “But maybe she’s just been listening to the lies Keith has been spreading.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Because that’s not it. There’s one more thing.” Then, I take a deep breath and dive right in. “I was late to gym class today, and while I was changing Keith, Darian and Simon game into the locker room.”
“The girls’ locker room?”
“Yeah. They were looking for a place to get high.”
“Oookay . . .” Sevren gestures for me to continue.
“I didn’t want to deal with them so I hid in the showers.”
“You were naked?”
“No!” I gasp, feeling ill at the thought of what might have happened if I had been. “No, I was tying my shoes when I heard them come in. I didn’t want to deal with their usual crap so I went into the showers to wait until they left.”
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