The Monsters Box

This evening, I was given my first opportunity to read my work out to an audience. This is the short piece I wrote for the occasion. It's Halloween, so the theme was 'monster'.

All rights reserved, of course.

The Monsters Box

I took the kitchen entrance, up a concrete ramp through doors that swung shut behind me. The back passageways were a maze, navigated only by cleaners, cooks and other scurrying hospital employees, and I found my way to my lab by feel, like a clever rat.
Pinned to my door was an envelope. Inside was a letter. Congratulations, it read, You’ve been promoted. It was signed ‘Mrs van Blerk’, and instructed me to report to a room in the basement. I was surprised. I’d always thought I was much too grim to be the butt of practical jokes. But it had the official hospital letterhead, so I thought I’d better check it out.
I’d never been to the basement. Down here, all sound was muted. I walked for some time, passing many closed doors and shadowy wards. There was no one around but me. Near the room number specified, I turned into a passage that stretched away to vanishing point, as long as one of the ward corridors above but forever untouched by sunlight. The only distinguishing feature was a nearby window in the wall. Bright eco-friendly light lit the room beyond, and on the counter stood a white box without a lid. Printed on the box, all in caps, was the word MONSTERS. Now I’m not what you’d call bilingual, but I’d worked in hospitals long enough to know that I was looking at the Afrikaans word for ‘samples’ or ‘specimens’. Nothing odd about that, right?
Despite a growing unease, I decided to check the box. I’ve tested the most obscure and noisome substances the body can produce; call it professional curiosity. I went over and looked in, only to find it empty. Relieved and somehow disappointed, I was about to head back the way I’d come when I saw a figure approaching from way down at the far end of the corridor. It moved strangely, somehow. Obeying the urge to hide, I opened the closest door and stepped inside, leaving it open a fraction so I could see out.
I began to hear a metallic pinging and snapping like taut wires. Someone sobbed with the voice of a child, and creaked, and sobbed again. Bent double and listing to one side, a person in a black raincoat lurched into my field of vision. He carried a leaking Pepstores bag clenched in his fist. Machinery clicked and spun, and he limped to the box and deposited his bag with a squelch.
Struck by a sudden stench of rot, I made some sound and the patient swung to face me. His raincoat was just stitched-together black bags, and he himself was an exoskeleton of rusting metal rods and gears, torso wrenched at right angles to a tangle of legs. He had human eyes, though, gelatinous in a stained faceplate, and a mess of sickly innards caged in his innermost parts. Sobbing, he staggered towards me, and I pulled the door shut in a panic.
The handle jolted in my hands, but fear made me strong. What the fuck was going on down here in my hospital?
Then I heard a woman’s voice, clean through the door: “Stop that, you little shit.”
The door stopped shaking.
“Come over here. What the bloody hell is this? Do you call this a sample?”
She had the no-nonsense tone of a middle-aged nursing sister. The patient stuttered like a sewing machine, but she cut him off.
“And what happened to all those specimen bottles I gave you last time? Hey?
“You in there, you’d better come out quick-quick. The vampires don’t like to be disturbed when they’re feeding.”
She was talking to me! I turned around with mounting horror. I was in a ward, and on every bed lay a twisted, hairless, half-human shape receiving multiple blood transfusions. The red bags hung everywhere like ripe fruit. The nearest vampire lifted its head, narrowed its eyes at me and said, “Sssshhhh!”
I swallowed a scream and bolted out of the room.
Behind the counter across the way stood a squat woman, permed and greying, dressed in crisp navy blue with maroon epaulettes. “Are you new?” she asked.
“I run my own lab,” I said. “I got a letter.”
“Is it.” She looked me up and down.
The thing wearing black bags eyed me curiously. I shrank against the wall.
“What are you staring at?” snapped the nurse. “Off you go. Dr Harksen, Room 404, and take your ectoplasm with you!”
As the creature shuffled away with its dribbling bag, the sister came out into the corridor and straightened me up.
“I’m Mrs van Blerk. Congratulations on your promotion. We’ve needed a new lab technician for ages.”
A nurse hurried past carrying a Tupperware full of severed hands that clawed at the inside of the container. A presence made of pure darkness followed her anxiously, leaving a chill in the air.
“But these things—they’re monsters!” I said.
Mrs van Blerk loomed over me. I smelled sulphur. She opened her mouth, revealing suspiciously pointed teeth.
“Monsters? I suppose so, yes.”
She grinned.
“But even monsters deserve affordable healthcare.”