“Cancellation?” I asked. Maryam had been gone less than an hour.
“I think so, anyway best get it over and done with.” She had brought a wheelchair and helped me into it. I eased myself down gently. Sitting was still my most uncomfortable position, mainly owing to the pressure it put on the area of my body where the skin had been harvested to create the flaps that had recreated my vulva. I clenched my teeth against the stinging pain.
“What’s it like, on a scale of one to ten?” Joyce asked.
“About a seven at the moment,” I said.
“When we get back, you’ll be able to have some co-codamol.”
“I could do with some.”
“It’s too soon after your last dose. Give it another hour.”
I nodded, concentrating hard on trying to push the pain away. If I told myself it didn’t hurt, it wouldn’t, right? Mind over matter. I had read screeds of worthy advice before I came into hospital. Right now I could have cheerfully strangled all those who had beamed at me on my computer screen, with their perfect white teeth, no doubt basking in the sunshine of their Miami mansions bought with the proceeds of their bullshit. You should try sitting where I am, in my body, sometime.
We arrived outside the room where the scan would take place. I was an old hand at this now and it was a relief to stand up. The raging stinging settled down from feeling as if a hundred hornets were simultaneously attacking me to a dull burn. From inside the room I heard the familiar rhythmic clanking of the MRI machine.
“Won’t be long now,” Joyce said.
Joyce handed me over to the radiographer. She looked vaguely familiar, but I had seen so many members of staff over the past few months.
Inside the room, I saw the doughnut shape of the scanner, with a hard bed waiting for me to occupy it. I had gone in feet first previously but this would be a brain scan. Head first. I shivered. Not that I was normally claustrophobic, but the thought of being enclosed by this sophisticated piece of equipment suddenly terrified me.
“Are you all right, Vanessa?”
My face must have betrayed my fears because the radiographer was giving me a look of deep concern. “Do you want to take a minute?”
I shook my head. If I was ever going to do this it had better be now. I put my watch in the pocket of my dressing gown, took it off and laid it on a nearby chair, wishing my hands would stop shaking.
With a nurse’s help, I lay down on the uncomfortable bed and closed my eyes. At least then I wouldn’t be able to see my prison. Another nurse positioned a pair of headphones on my head. They would blot out the worst of the noise.
The radiographer spoke softly through the speaker. I could tell her at any time if I panicked and they would get me out. The whole procedure would only take a few minutes. I should relax.
I felt a sharp tug and then a slow progression as the machine drew me into itself. Slowly…. I screwed my eyes tightly shut. I didn’t want even one chink of light to seep through. I concentrated on lying perfectly still, barely breathing. The machine started its relentless mix of clanking and a sort of incessant hum. In a weird kind of way, the rhythmical noise was soothing. I tried to concentrate on thinking happy thoughts but the only image that kept repeating itself was the face of that ghostly woman I had seen in the old corridor. She dominated my mind, so real I actually felt I was looking at her. I seemed to float out of myself, not aware of the machine, the tube I lay in or even the hospital. I existed in a state of limbo, only for a few seconds, but in those seconds my reality was far from where I knew I must be.
The clanking stopped. The voice came through the speaker. “All done. We’ll get you out now. You can open your eyes.”
I suppose everyone closes them, but I certainly wasn’t opening mine until I was sure I was well clear of the machine’s confines.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
I was about to shake my head. Then I caught a glimpse of what was standing behind the radiographer and gasped.
“Whatever’s the matter?”
“There’s someone behind you.”
The radiographer spun round. “Where?”
There was no one there, but she had been. I would swear she had. The little girl. Agnes. And she had pointed to me.
* * *
All I wanted was to return to my room, but Joyce kept me waiting in the wheelchair while she had a word with the radiographer. I knew from the hushed whispers that the nurse was being regaled with details of my sudden outburst. I tried to keep my face non-expressive. Next stop Psychiatric Ward if I wasn’t careful.
Eventually Joyce pasted a smile on her face and came to wheel me back, which she did mostly in silence, beyond making some light remarks about how the weather had turned a lot colder.
“We’ll be getting snow by the weekend,” she said.
I murmured some form of agreement and tried hard not to panic about what I had seen. That someone – or something – was trying to communicate with me was, in my mind at least, certain, and their need to do so had clearly risen a notch. The questions remained as to why, and for what reason I had been chosen.
Another blow came when Paul rang to tell me he couldn’t come to see me that evening. Some crisis at school threatened to keep him there for hours. After a few mouthfuls of a mild chicken curry, I couldn’t eat anything else and gave up the effort, concentrating instead on vanilla ice cream.
Television proved its usual mix of game shows, soap operas and films of varying quality. A daft little comedy kept me mildly amused for a couple of hours until the evening cup of tea arrived and it was time for me to get ready for bed. I read a little but found it difficult to concentrate. When I eventually turned off my overhead light and shifted into as comfortable a position as my body would allow, my eyes had grown heavy with sleep.
I must have drifted off straightaway because when I awoke, it was with a jump. Surely I had only lain down a couple of minutes previously. I listened. Silence.
Then it came. That thumping I had heard previously. This was my chance.
I didn’t even stop to think what I was doing. I grabbed my slippers and dressing gown and made my way to the door. I opened it quietly. A glance at my watch told me it was two-fifty. I watched the retreating form of the nurse on duty as she made for the far end of the corridor. Hadn’t she heard the noise? It was loud enough, but evidently I was the only one permitted to hear it.
A movement in the corner of my eye distracted me. In the wall opposite, the door had reappeared. Once again, it stood ajar. I pushed it open wider and stepped in.
The familiar musty smell hit me and the gas mantles flickered as before. I cursed myself for forgetting to put my phone in my pocket. Snapshots of this corridor would surely have provided the proof I needed. I could go back to my room but that would risk coming back to find the door gone. Nothing for it, I would have to find something else.
For a moment, the corridor was deserted. Then the murmur of voices reached my ears. Figures materialized all around me. The same ghostly apparitions I had seen before, all ignoring me as if I, and not they, didn’t exist. The scene swirled before my eyes at a nauseating speed.
The woman with the piercing gray eyes appeared, her gaze once again boring into me.
“Who are you?” I asked again. But still she wouldn’t answer. She put out her hand, but not in a friendly way. Her fingers clenched into claws. I shrank from her icy touch and an unpleasant smile spread over her face. A look, almost of triumph, lit up her eyes.
“You’re next,” she said and vanished, along with all the others in the corridor. Still I had no proof. But this time, she had made physical contact. Her fingers had brushed my arm – the lightest of touches, but where she had made contact felt grazed.
She had said those words again, the same voice I had heard whispering them in my ear. All my instincts told me I had to get out of there fas
t, but I had to take something with me. Something that couldn’t possibly have come from the present-day hospital.
I looked around me. A piece of linoleum perhaps, or scraps of the peeling paint. I tried to bend, but a sharp pain warned me to stop, so I settled for some larger scraps of paint hanging off the wall and slid them into my pocket. The color was a dirty yellowish white, completely unlike the soft pale gray of the present hospital walls, and the texture felt strangely granular. I hurried back along the corridor to the door leading to my ward.
The door that was no longer there.
Panic set in. I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. But how could I? I had walked in a straight line. Pressing my hands against the wall, I willed the door to reappear, even pushed at it in the hope the wall would somehow give and let me through.
Behind me, voices struck up again. Chattering, their conversations indistinct. Smells of disinfectant and human sweat mingled and swam around me and, all the while, one voice sounded above the rest. The woman’s voice repeated over and over, “You’re next…you’re next….”
A hand tugged at my dressing gown. I looked down at the little girl’s face.
“Agnes?” I asked.
She nodded. “You can’t be here. You mustn’t stay and you mustn’t come back. She wants you here too badly.”
“Who is she, Agnes? Who is that woman who keeps appearing to me in this place? What do you know about her?”
The little girl blinked a few times and bit her lip. “I don’t know her name. No one knows her name. She gets inside people and makes her home there. Then they die and she finds another. She found my ma. And took her. They told me so.”
“Took her where?”
“She took her body.”
“Is it your ma that I see here? Does she have gray eyes?”
Agnes shook her head and lowered her eyes.
“Agnes?”
She looked back up at me. “You have to go now. It’s not safe.”
“I’m trying to leave but the door’s disappeared. Do you know another way?”
Agnes continued to look at me, her eyes wide. She slowly shook her head. “I’m not allowed. I have to stay here. The only time I can leave is when she lets me.”
“Do you want to leave?” I asked.
She nodded. “But I know I can’t. Not yet. It isn’t my time.”
Something about Agnes’s appearance today had been bothering me. Then I realized. Her dress. Before she had looked as if she probably belonged in the Victorian era, the same as the others that inhabited these corridors. But this time she looked different, her clothes belonging to an age far earlier than that. The collar of her dress would not have looked out of place during the English Civil War, and neither would her bonnet. “How old are you, Agnes?”
“I think I’m ten now.”
“How long have you been here?”
She shrugged. “Always.”
“And this is…was…the only way in and out of here?”
Agnes shrugged again.
“There must be another way. A main entrance.”
The realization that I would have to go farther into the building in order to get out of it frightened me, but who knew when, or even if, the door would appear in this wall again?
“Will you come with me, Agnes? You don’t have to leave here, but I would welcome your company.”
What was I doing speaking to a ghost like this? But somehow it made sense. If she knew enough to know the woman wanted to keep me here, maybe she could also help me evade her clutches. Any straw, however fragile, was worth clinging to at this time.
Agnes slipped her cold hand into mine. It was like being grasped by a snowflake.
With one last, desperate look at where the door should have been, I started down the corridor.
Chapter Thirteen
It felt strange moving among ghosts, especially when it seemed none of them could see me. Only Agnes. I glanced down at her, to find her gazing up at me through pale, almost colorless eyes. She was only a child – a strange one, even in these most peculiar of circumstances, seeming out of place and time wherever she manifested herself – but those eyes seemed to hold knowledge more appropriate in a much older person. They were old eyes in a young body. And her apparent concern for my welfare did not ring entirely true although, for the life of me, I couldn’t think why. I pushed the thoughts away. They took my already frazzled nerves into overdrive.
I also noticed Agnes seemed not to need to watch where she was going, but then she had walked these corridors for so long she probably knew every inch of them blindfolded. Not only that, I was becoming more and more convinced that Agnes was as much out of time here as I was. Apart from her current mode of dress, she was too young to be with the rest of the women.
There were no men among the constantly changing collection of faces. I knew from history that workhouses had been segregated. No family life here. Women and young children in one block – but kept separate – men and older boys in the other. The faces showed few smiles. Most looked tired, worn down by poverty and the hopelessness of their situation. Here, if I was to believe the evidence of my own eyes, even death would not part them from that.
I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness, a huge sense of loss. And then I heard the scream.
We froze. The scream came again. “Did you hear that?” I asked Agnes.
She nodded. Why didn’t she seem scared? As if she had read my thoughts, she spoke.
“It’s the madwoman. They tie her up when she makes too much noise.”
A door opened and a well-dressed male strode out. “Keep her sedated.”
One of the nurses spoke. “But what about the relatives, Dr. Franklyn? Surely we must let them know.”
“There are no relatives, Nurse. Not here. Not now.”
The nurse nodded to the door, which still stood slightly ajar. The woman’s screams had died down to long, low moans. “She shouldn’t even be here. She should be in the asylum. How can they say she’s not insane? You only have to look at her.”
“Nevertheless,” the doctor said, “she is here and we have to contain her behavior as best we can. She’s been quiet recently. Today was an unfortunate lapse. I’ll increase her dosage and she will cease to be a problem. Alert the orderlies and the morgue, and you’ll need the key for the corridor. We don’t want to alarm the inmates by dragging a corpse through the building.”
The nurses and doctor moved away, seeming to have forgotten all about the open door.
I moved closer. Agnes tugged on my arm.
“Don’t go near. She’ll kill you.”
I couldn’t help it. I had to see for myself who this woman was. Besides, she was sedated.
I crept into the room and up to the meager bed. Leather restraints secured the woman’s wrists and ankles where angry sores had suppurated and oozed blood and stinking pus. What remained of her strangely modern-looking nightdress was little more than rags, filthy like the rest of her. Tentatively, I leaned over and looked into the woman’s face. I recoiled both from the smell and the shock. Her eyes flew open. Her lips pulled back over her teeth in a snarl. Her voice was no more than a croak, but each word chilled me.
“You’re next.”
I raced out of the room, my heart thudding. I had to get out of that place. Agnes was nowhere to be seen. The corridor was empty and I had been trapped out of my time and space with no idea how to get back, and a strong sensation of being watched. I tried to run but the best I managed was a hobble. Pain surged through me. I held my distended belly and prayed for help. Someone moved up behind me and I glanced over my shoulder, letting out a cry as I recognized the woman from the bed. She was gaining on me.
Her voice echoed. A thin, dry cackle. “You’re next. She will have you. She has decided.”
How could she have freed herself from those restra
ints?
She’s a ghost. Of course she could get free. The specter floated, some inches off the ground, her feet bare, straggly hair gusting behind her. She was maybe thirty feet away, but I knew she was making up the distance fast.
The corridor swung round to the right and sheer terror fueled the adrenaline that kept me going. Ahead, a Victorian-style door with glass panes through which daylight streamed. I prayed it wasn’t locked. When I turned the handle and it opened, I dragged myself through and slammed it behind me. I leaned against the wooden panels, panting, my eyes closed.
“Are you all right?”
I opened my eyes, relieved to find I was back in the hospital in my own time, but not my ward. An unfamiliar nurse dressed in blue scrubs peered at me anxiously and I forced a smile on my face. “Yes, thanks. I seem to have got myself a bit lost. I should be in the Gynae Ward.”
She smiled. “I’ll take you back. You’re only a little mislaid.” She took me down past bays and individual rooms, out through double doors and into a familiar corridor. To my left I saw the sign ‘Gynecology Ward’.
“There you are. Not too far from home.”
“Thanks,” I said. In familiar surroundings once more, I managed to regain my composure enough to be able to saunter – well, my version of it anyway – back onto my ward.
Joyce met me at the Nurses’ station. “You were up early. Breakfast hasn’t even been served yet. Been for a walk? Go anywhere nice?”
I pasted a smile on my face. “Oh, just into town, quick bit of retail therapy.”
She laughed and I made my way back to my room, where I sank onto the bed, exhausted. I didn’t even remove my dressing gown but did shrug my slippers off. Painfully, I bent down and picked one of them up. The sole was filthy. Was that evidence of my claims to have been somewhere other than the clean wards of this hospital? Hardly. It would only prove I had stepped outside.
Remembering my precious cargo, I reached into my pocket. Sure enough the flakes of paint were still there. I extracted them one by one and laid them on the bedside cabinet. They didn’t look much. Just some old whitewash and paint layers in small insignificant chips. Better than nothing, but not much.
In Darkness, Shadows Breathe Page 17