Ghost Story--Chapter two
Chapter one
News from the Lighthouse
Ravenswood General was originally built in the early-1800s to deal with the advancing White Plague. At the time, it was the most advanced sanitarium in the South, rivaling the famous Waverly Hills of Kentucky nearly a century sooner, with nearly twice the capacity.
As the tragedy of the outbreak gave way to the horrors of war, the hospital found itself to have new and renewed purpose. Several important figures are known to have stayed here, including Robert E. Lee himself, who was injured during his march south of West Virginia.
Naturally, a place with such a storied history of suffering is bound to have more than a few ghost stories.
In the late eighties, as the hospital was beginning to feel its age and make way for newer, more modern hospitals, a training nurse found herself called to a patient room where no patient was known to be assigned. She bid her coworkers farewell, and ran off to attend to her duties, and…apparently walked off the face of the Earth.
The young nurse never returned to her post. Nobody knows for sure what happened to her, but some patients reported, on an otherwise quiet night, hearing the most vile screaming coming from the hospital grounds. Several thought there must have been some sort of calamity, a fire or car accident, and the delirious occupant of an ambulance was being brought inside.
Other rumors suggested that the young nurse had a beau and the page from the empty room was a signal for them to run away together. Still others claim the opposite, a jilted lover luring her away to exact his revenge.
In recent years, the sight of a young nurse in 1980s scrubs making her rounds through the vacant rooms has been a popular sighting.
Another story tells of a groundskeeper who saw a light coming from the now-abandoned hospital. He ventured inside, expecting to see a gaggle of teenagers undergoing youthful tests of bravery and coming-of-age rituals.
Instead, he is said to have found an operating theater in full occupancy, with medical students and spectators watching from the stands while a surgeon in a bloody apron performed an amputation on a screaming Confederate soldier.
The surgeon turned and stared at the groundskeeper, the way one would expect of a busy surgeon in the middle of a delicate surgery having a confused civilian walk in the operating room mid-operation.
The groundskeeper apologized to the specters, turned around, walked away from his post, and never came back to work.
Signed,
The Lighthouse Keeper
My hands are fixed at ten and two, eyes straight ahead, knuckles white. Am I shaking? I think I’m shaking.
The engine idles like I’m at a stoplight. The creature next to me whimpers and begs in German.
“Mein spuk,” he pleads, tears staining his cheeks, absently scratching and the blackened spiderweb of veins at his right elbow beneath my raincoat. “Mein spuk.”
His frail form shivers under my coat, beads of sweat at his temples. There’s a smell in the air, familiar but not comforting, like a melancholy perfume. It’s definitely floral, but I can’t place it, and it isn’t one of mine.
“Look, kid, I’m willing to take quite a lot on faith,” I tell the whimpering form, “but I’m going to need some guarantees. I need to know I saw what I thought I did, that you’re not going to murder me in my sleep, and whoever had you isn’t going to be out for my blood.”
“Mein spuk. Mein spuk.”
I scratch an itch on my scalp under my bandanna, grateful I don’t have to worry about leaving hair at the crime scene, and then sigh heavily into my rearview mirror. I don’t normally let people into the RV. It’s smaller than a traditional home, so the presence of other people weighs heavy on me.
The whole point of living in an RV is, after all, to be able to get away from everything.
I place my head against my steering wheel, taking deep, 3-4-3 breaths. I can’t believe I’m doing this. I must be dissociating, because none of this feels real and I think I’m having an out of body experience.
Still, as they say, I know what I saw. I saw something not human, something made only of bone and yet still moving.
In a hospital thought to be haunted by the patients.
Well, what’s the worst that could happen? Whoever was holding him comes after me, and I find myself in a bed next to him. He turns out to be some sort of deviant who was sedated for the safety of others, and I just brought the fox into the henhouse. I publish a paper definitively proving the supernatural and become the most famous journalist ever.
So what do I do?
He’s gone silent, maybe asleep. He’s breathing, so he isn’t dead. If he dies on my watch, then…
Well, better than whatever was going on in that abandoned hospital.
I put the car in park and turn off the engine. My passenger starts squirming and begging again, like a fussy infant lulled by the sound of the engine.
“You’re safe now,” I tell him in a consoling tone as I unbuckle us both.
I ditched the wheelchair when I loaded him into my car. The walk from the car to the RV is a lot shorter and I didn’t want to get caught with it, seeing as it could tie me to the scene of the crime, and taking souvenirs is considered a social faux pas in my profession.
Once free of my seat, I stand in front of the passenger side, just staring at him. He’s got fine, delicate features like a porcelain doll, large eyes the palest blue I’ve ever seen, and hair I can only describe as “Targaryan blond.” It’s soaked with sweat and plastered to his skull, but even in the fading twilight I can’t deny the spun moonlight color.
His forearms and calves are angry red and purple, reminding me of the skeleton in the hospital bed with cracked wrists. The burned veins stand out like blackened ash against bleach bone, making me picture the shadow in the hospital bed.
I must be losing my mind.
“Sicher?” he asks, barely able to hold his head up. “Ich werde zu Hause in Sicherheit sein.”
It’s awkward holding him up as I fumble with my keys, trying to jam the right one into the lock and dropping the whole ring in the process.
“Bitte,” he pleads. “Bitte, Lass mich gehen. Ich werde es niemandem erzählen.”
“Hush,” I whisper back, trying to hold him up and reaching for my keys at the same time. “We’re almost there.”
Nothing to see here, good people. Just a couple of drunk kids coming home after an afternoon drinking.
After several tries and another almost-drop, I manage to swing the door open. The sudden change in air flow from the AC hits my guest in the face, prompting those deeply, deeply unsettling eyes to snap open.
“Bitte! Bitte! Nicht hier drin! Tu mir das nicht noch einmal an!” he cries. “Ich möchte zu meinem Spuk zurückkehren! Bring mich nach Hause!”
His arms flail out in both directions, his heels dug into the ground, blocking the door, panic dripping from his voice and manner. If he doesn’t stop shouting, we’re going to go viral from someone’s window.
“Sshh,” I whisper, stroking his hair. “You’re going to take a little nap and then you can tell me all about it.”
Despite the thick layer of feverish sweat coating him, he smells like a broken perfume bottle. I smell roses and lilies, and a few other flowers I can’t quite name. As a whole, it smells familiar, but not like a flower shop, exactly, and certainly not a wedding.
“Kein gift mehr!” he begs as I drag him up the two steps and over the threshhold, flailing and kicking his legs, my jacket abandoned in the doorway. “Du wirst mich umbringen! Ich will nicht sterben!”
By this point I’m dragging him across the floor, splayed out in my living room/dining room/kitchen/laundry room. As fast as I can to avoid witnesses, I grab my jacket and slam the door closed, locking it.
“Ich will nicht sterben!” he begs, trying to right himself.
“Hey, hey, calm down,” I tell him, laying my jacket across him for some semblance of dignity. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Gift! Gift in meinen Adern! Es brennt!” he shouts, scratching at the burned veins on his right arm. His fingernails and toenails are an unhealthy black, like the nail beds are damaged. “Mein Spuk! Mein Spuk! Wo ist es? Wo ist mein Spuk?”
He’s lying on his back in the middle of my floor, screaming in German, and I don’t know what to do. I can hear my heart over him, my palms cold and clammy, and I try to remember the right breath counts for keeping a clear head.
“Let’s get you someplace more comfortable,” I tell him gently, wrapping him in my coat to pin his flailing arms down. “You’re going to hurt yourself here.”
“Fassen Sie mich nicht an! Ich werde kein Gift mehr haben! Furchtlose Wenige, ihr Feiglinge!”
He squirms and strains against my coat, but I hold him tight, dragging him limply toward the bedroom. His feet scrabble against the black and white tile, catching on the metal threshold, and then against the tan carpet. He’s light but he’s feisty, and he does not want to be in my bedroom.
I drag him onto the bed and halfway to the pillows before taking off my jacket. He cries and begs and flails at assailants I can’t see, scratching at the angry blackish lines that show where that green stuff burned him.
“Spooky, honey, look at me,” I order, taking him by the chin, watching his eyes momentarily fix on me. “I’m Eileen. You’re in my RV. Can you tell me your name? Do you have someone I can call to get you?”
“Ich will einfach nur nach Hause,” he whimpers. “Mein spuk. Mein Leichenschauhaus.”
“I’m not going to hurt you, but I need you to help me help you,” I continue. “Who was holding you? What were they doing? Is there someone who can help you?”
“Mein spuk. Mein spuk.”
“Do you speak English?”
“Natürlich tue ich das, abscheuliche Hexe,” he raves. “Behalte dein Gift und schick mich nach Hause!”
His eyes are at the ceiling, unfocused. He writhes in my bed like he’s on fire, begging and pleading.
“Calm down before you hurt yourself!” I demand. “Just relax, you’re safe here.”
Pacing the room and not knowing what else to do, I grab the little bundle of sage I keep by my bed. They say it clears out bad spirits, but mostly it sanitizes the air, so six of one, half a dozen of the other. The smell is also pretty soothing, especially since I generally have a ritual of burning it after a long day of work, when I know I’m home and can relax.
I light it up, holding the flameless lighter away from my face, until it catches a spark. The smoke wafts through the air, like a graceful, gray dancer, spinning her skirts through the air.
My guest arches his back, inhaling deeply. I swear the smoke from the sage flows into his nose like water through a straw. As soon as it hits his airways, he sighs, every tense muscle in his taught, toned body relaxing like melted jell-o. His unfocused eyes flutter closed, his breathing deep and even.
I stare at the sage like it did it on purpose before putting it back on the little clay dish to smolder.
“Well…alright then,” I murmur, taking out my cell phone to jot down a note.
Smell sage = sedative?
It could be a coincidence, like he wore himself out, finally, but it certainly seemed like he was inhaling the sage like cats do catnip. It’s worth trying again if he starts getting...argumentative and puts either of us at risk.
But now, onto more practical matters.
I stop in the bathroom to wash my hands three times, staring at my tired, sweaty, oily face in the mirror and think what to do next.
Clothes. He can’t go around practically naked.
He needs a bath if he’s going to wear clean clothes.
I can’t get him into my shower half-crazed and sedated.
Baby wipes. Under the kitchen sink.
I walk through the bedroom, smelling herby sage and floral Spooky, past the couch, and then into the kitchen, and come back with the wipes. The man in my bed looks like a lead statue, solid and unmoving, except for his chest, breathing deeply.
I stand in my doorway, holding the wipes up to my chest, like a child with a doll. He looks so serene, peaceful. Pushing thoughts about privacy aside, I snap a quick picture with my phone, seeing as I am a documentarian, after all.
Once that itch has been scratched, I set to work with the baby wipes, starting at the most needful spots like under the arms and the soles of the feet. He whimpers fretfully and flinches at the cold touch of the wipes, but doesn’t wake.
He’s burning up with fever. I need to do something about that. I got some ibuprofen, but can he have normal medicine?
I make a mental note to do things the old-fashioned way and get an ice pack out of the fridge, just in case.
Once he’s something approaching clean, I wash my hands three times and then start looking for something more presentable. I have a set of jammies I just bought, soft fleece pants with bedsheet ghosts and a shirt that reads “Spookernatural!” seems appropriate enough.
I haven’t even gotten a chance to wear it myself.
I wrangle him into pants and throw the old hospital gown in the trash, then wash my hands three times. With him quiet and dressed, I have a few minutes to think.
So what now?
My stomach growls, as if in answer.
“Oh, yeah,” I murmur. “I’m hungry. How about you?”
“S-spuk,” he murmurs.
Chapter three
News from the Lighthouse
Ravenswood General was originally built in the early-1800s to deal with the advancing White Plague. At the time, it was the most advanced sanitarium in the South, rivaling the famous Waverly Hills of Kentucky nearly a century sooner, with nearly twice the capacity.
As the tragedy of the outbreak gave way to the horrors of war, the hospital found itself to have new and renewed purpose. Several important figures are known to have stayed here, including Robert E. Lee himself, who was injured during his march south of West Virginia.
Naturally, a place with such a storied history of suffering is bound to have more than a few ghost stories.
In the late eighties, as the hospital was beginning to feel its age and make way for newer, more modern hospitals, a training nurse found herself called to a patient room where no patient was known to be assigned. She bid her coworkers farewell, and ran off to attend to her duties, and…apparently walked off the face of the Earth.
The young nurse never returned to her post. Nobody knows for sure what happened to her, but some patients reported, on an otherwise quiet night, hearing the most vile screaming coming from the hospital grounds. Several thought there must have been some sort of calamity, a fire or car accident, and the delirious occupant of an ambulance was being brought inside.
Other rumors suggested that the young nurse had a beau and the page from the empty room was a signal for them to run away together. Still others claim the opposite, a jilted lover luring her away to exact his revenge.
In recent years, the sight of a young nurse in 1980s scrubs making her rounds through the vacant rooms has been a popular sighting.
Another story tells of a groundskeeper who saw a light coming from the now-abandoned hospital. He ventured inside, expecting to see a gaggle of teenagers undergoing youthful tests of bravery and coming-of-age rituals.
Instead, he is said to have found an operating theater in full occupancy, with medical students and spectators watching from the stands while a surgeon in a bloody apron performed an amputation on a screaming Confederate soldier.
The surgeon turned and stared at the groundskeeper, the way one would expect of a busy surgeon in the middle of a delicate surgery having a confused civilian walk in the operating room mid-operation.
The groundskeeper apologized to the specters, turned around, walked away from his post, and never came back to work.
Signed,
The Lighthouse Keeper
My hands are fixed at ten and two, eyes straight ahead, knuckles white. Am I shaking? I think I’m shaking.
The engine idles like I’m at a stoplight. The creature next to me whimpers and begs in German.
“Mein spuk,” he pleads, tears staining his cheeks, absently scratching and the blackened spiderweb of veins at his right elbow beneath my raincoat. “Mein spuk.”
His frail form shivers under my coat, beads of sweat at his temples. There’s a smell in the air, familiar but not comforting, like a melancholy perfume. It’s definitely floral, but I can’t place it, and it isn’t one of mine.
“Look, kid, I’m willing to take quite a lot on faith,” I tell the whimpering form, “but I’m going to need some guarantees. I need to know I saw what I thought I did, that you’re not going to murder me in my sleep, and whoever had you isn’t going to be out for my blood.”
“Mein spuk. Mein spuk.”
I scratch an itch on my scalp under my bandanna, grateful I don’t have to worry about leaving hair at the crime scene, and then sigh heavily into my rearview mirror. I don’t normally let people into the RV. It’s smaller than a traditional home, so the presence of other people weighs heavy on me.
The whole point of living in an RV is, after all, to be able to get away from everything.
I place my head against my steering wheel, taking deep, 3-4-3 breaths. I can’t believe I’m doing this. I must be dissociating, because none of this feels real and I think I’m having an out of body experience.
Still, as they say, I know what I saw. I saw something not human, something made only of bone and yet still moving.
In a hospital thought to be haunted by the patients.
Well, what’s the worst that could happen? Whoever was holding him comes after me, and I find myself in a bed next to him. He turns out to be some sort of deviant who was sedated for the safety of others, and I just brought the fox into the henhouse. I publish a paper definitively proving the supernatural and become the most famous journalist ever.
So what do I do?
He’s gone silent, maybe asleep. He’s breathing, so he isn’t dead. If he dies on my watch, then…
Well, better than whatever was going on in that abandoned hospital.
I put the car in park and turn off the engine. My passenger starts squirming and begging again, like a fussy infant lulled by the sound of the engine.
“You’re safe now,” I tell him in a consoling tone as I unbuckle us both.
I ditched the wheelchair when I loaded him into my car. The walk from the car to the RV is a lot shorter and I didn’t want to get caught with it, seeing as it could tie me to the scene of the crime, and taking souvenirs is considered a social faux pas in my profession.
Once free of my seat, I stand in front of the passenger side, just staring at him. He’s got fine, delicate features like a porcelain doll, large eyes the palest blue I’ve ever seen, and hair I can only describe as “Targaryan blond.” It’s soaked with sweat and plastered to his skull, but even in the fading twilight I can’t deny the spun moonlight color.
His forearms and calves are angry red and purple, reminding me of the skeleton in the hospital bed with cracked wrists. The burned veins stand out like blackened ash against bleach bone, making me picture the shadow in the hospital bed.
I must be losing my mind.
“Sicher?” he asks, barely able to hold his head up. “Ich werde zu Hause in Sicherheit sein.”
It’s awkward holding him up as I fumble with my keys, trying to jam the right one into the lock and dropping the whole ring in the process.
“Bitte,” he pleads. “Bitte, Lass mich gehen. Ich werde es niemandem erzählen.”
“Hush,” I whisper back, trying to hold him up and reaching for my keys at the same time. “We’re almost there.”
Nothing to see here, good people. Just a couple of drunk kids coming home after an afternoon drinking.
After several tries and another almost-drop, I manage to swing the door open. The sudden change in air flow from the AC hits my guest in the face, prompting those deeply, deeply unsettling eyes to snap open.
“Bitte! Bitte! Nicht hier drin! Tu mir das nicht noch einmal an!” he cries. “Ich möchte zu meinem Spuk zurückkehren! Bring mich nach Hause!”
His arms flail out in both directions, his heels dug into the ground, blocking the door, panic dripping from his voice and manner. If he doesn’t stop shouting, we’re going to go viral from someone’s window.
“Sshh,” I whisper, stroking his hair. “You’re going to take a little nap and then you can tell me all about it.”
Despite the thick layer of feverish sweat coating him, he smells like a broken perfume bottle. I smell roses and lilies, and a few other flowers I can’t quite name. As a whole, it smells familiar, but not like a flower shop, exactly, and certainly not a wedding.
“Kein gift mehr!” he begs as I drag him up the two steps and over the threshhold, flailing and kicking his legs, my jacket abandoned in the doorway. “Du wirst mich umbringen! Ich will nicht sterben!”
By this point I’m dragging him across the floor, splayed out in my living room/dining room/kitchen/laundry room. As fast as I can to avoid witnesses, I grab my jacket and slam the door closed, locking it.
“Ich will nicht sterben!” he begs, trying to right himself.
“Hey, hey, calm down,” I tell him, laying my jacket across him for some semblance of dignity. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Gift! Gift in meinen Adern! Es brennt!” he shouts, scratching at the burned veins on his right arm. His fingernails and toenails are an unhealthy black, like the nail beds are damaged. “Mein Spuk! Mein Spuk! Wo ist es? Wo ist mein Spuk?”
He’s lying on his back in the middle of my floor, screaming in German, and I don’t know what to do. I can hear my heart over him, my palms cold and clammy, and I try to remember the right breath counts for keeping a clear head.
“Let’s get you someplace more comfortable,” I tell him gently, wrapping him in my coat to pin his flailing arms down. “You’re going to hurt yourself here.”
“Fassen Sie mich nicht an! Ich werde kein Gift mehr haben! Furchtlose Wenige, ihr Feiglinge!”
He squirms and strains against my coat, but I hold him tight, dragging him limply toward the bedroom. His feet scrabble against the black and white tile, catching on the metal threshold, and then against the tan carpet. He’s light but he’s feisty, and he does not want to be in my bedroom.
I drag him onto the bed and halfway to the pillows before taking off my jacket. He cries and begs and flails at assailants I can’t see, scratching at the angry blackish lines that show where that green stuff burned him.
“Spooky, honey, look at me,” I order, taking him by the chin, watching his eyes momentarily fix on me. “I’m Eileen. You’re in my RV. Can you tell me your name? Do you have someone I can call to get you?”
“Ich will einfach nur nach Hause,” he whimpers. “Mein spuk. Mein Leichenschauhaus.”
“I’m not going to hurt you, but I need you to help me help you,” I continue. “Who was holding you? What were they doing? Is there someone who can help you?”
“Mein spuk. Mein spuk.”
“Do you speak English?”
“Natürlich tue ich das, abscheuliche Hexe,” he raves. “Behalte dein Gift und schick mich nach Hause!”
His eyes are at the ceiling, unfocused. He writhes in my bed like he’s on fire, begging and pleading.
“Calm down before you hurt yourself!” I demand. “Just relax, you’re safe here.”
Pacing the room and not knowing what else to do, I grab the little bundle of sage I keep by my bed. They say it clears out bad spirits, but mostly it sanitizes the air, so six of one, half a dozen of the other. The smell is also pretty soothing, especially since I generally have a ritual of burning it after a long day of work, when I know I’m home and can relax.
I light it up, holding the flameless lighter away from my face, until it catches a spark. The smoke wafts through the air, like a graceful, gray dancer, spinning her skirts through the air.
My guest arches his back, inhaling deeply. I swear the smoke from the sage flows into his nose like water through a straw. As soon as it hits his airways, he sighs, every tense muscle in his taught, toned body relaxing like melted jell-o. His unfocused eyes flutter closed, his breathing deep and even.
I stare at the sage like it did it on purpose before putting it back on the little clay dish to smolder.
“Well…alright then,” I murmur, taking out my cell phone to jot down a note.
Smell sage = sedative?
It could be a coincidence, like he wore himself out, finally, but it certainly seemed like he was inhaling the sage like cats do catnip. It’s worth trying again if he starts getting...argumentative and puts either of us at risk.
But now, onto more practical matters.
I stop in the bathroom to wash my hands three times, staring at my tired, sweaty, oily face in the mirror and think what to do next.
Clothes. He can’t go around practically naked.
He needs a bath if he’s going to wear clean clothes.
I can’t get him into my shower half-crazed and sedated.
Baby wipes. Under the kitchen sink.
I walk through the bedroom, smelling herby sage and floral Spooky, past the couch, and then into the kitchen, and come back with the wipes. The man in my bed looks like a lead statue, solid and unmoving, except for his chest, breathing deeply.
I stand in my doorway, holding the wipes up to my chest, like a child with a doll. He looks so serene, peaceful. Pushing thoughts about privacy aside, I snap a quick picture with my phone, seeing as I am a documentarian, after all.
Once that itch has been scratched, I set to work with the baby wipes, starting at the most needful spots like under the arms and the soles of the feet. He whimpers fretfully and flinches at the cold touch of the wipes, but doesn’t wake.
He’s burning up with fever. I need to do something about that. I got some ibuprofen, but can he have normal medicine?
I make a mental note to do things the old-fashioned way and get an ice pack out of the fridge, just in case.
Once he’s something approaching clean, I wash my hands three times and then start looking for something more presentable. I have a set of jammies I just bought, soft fleece pants with bedsheet ghosts and a shirt that reads “Spookernatural!” seems appropriate enough.
I haven’t even gotten a chance to wear it myself.
I wrangle him into pants and throw the old hospital gown in the trash, then wash my hands three times. With him quiet and dressed, I have a few minutes to think.
So what now?
My stomach growls, as if in answer.
“Oh, yeah,” I murmur. “I’m hungry. How about you?”
“S-spuk,” he murmurs.
Chapter three
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