'I really don't mind working with her,' she said to herself
as she walked down the dim corridor, her white nurses' shoes
squeaking softly on the linoleum floor, 'it's just that I can't
stand someone who brags about sleeping with a different man every
weekend.' Karen had been raised in Andover, by churchgoing
parents who set a curfew of eight o'clock, nine on weekends. She
had kept to herself as she went to school at the University of
Connecticut, moving to Shippee Hall, an all girls dormitory, to
escape the fumbling attentions of the boys on campus. She was
glad that she had, for she knew several girls that had gotten
pregnant and had dropped out of school, something which she could
not have imagined doing.
She liked her job at Hartford Hospital on N-12, the Cardiac
Recovery Floor, but she didn't like the night shift. Third shift
ran from eleven at night to seven thirty in the morning, and she
tended to have assignments that were too large and which didn't
let her talk to any of her patients. Karen felt that some
comforting talk could brighten their stay at the hospital a
little, at the very least. Most of their families didn't even
care enough to visit, judging by the frequency with which most of
the patients' relatives came to see them. They preferred to
pretend that their parents had already passed away, that these
people wasting away in the hospital were strangers, somebody that
they didn't know and therefore didn't need to visit.
When she had applied for the job, she had been excited,
misled by the cheerful title. Very few of the patients who came
here recovered; 12 North was where the hospital dumped all the
lost causes, the patients with tired hearts and bodies waiting to
finally slip into the painless sleep of death. Karen realized
that she might as well have applied for a job in a nursing home.
She had gotten a nice offer from Kendrick Place in Windsor, and
she had heard that the working conditions were good, but she had
wanted a job where she would help people, to brighten their days
and quicken their recovery. Instead she was on this floor of the
living dead. She had heard that the day shift had a pool going
in which they placed lots on who would be the next to go. She
hoped it wasn't so, but she knew a couple of the day nurses, who
were so calloused by the disheartening job that they didn't care
anymore, so she supposed it could be true.
Karen finally reached room 1213 and hit the button next to
the door to shut off the bell, glancing at the nameplate with
distaste as she did so. Oscar Kleiss was a wealthy businessman
from Greenwich, who had come to Hartford for routine surgery, but
something had gone wrong. The report said that there had been
complications, but she found that hard to believe, for Doctor
Weissman was one of the hospital's most respected surgeons.
There was a rumor that the arrangement of Kleiss's internal
organs was, well, peculiar, but it said nothing about that in the
report, so she didn't take much stock in it. She didn't know
exactly what had gone wrong, but she did know that Kleiss's heart
was damaged beyond repair, and he was waiting for a donor, one
that would be compatible with his immune system and blood type,
which was O negative, she recalled, making it unlikely that a
donor organ would be found before the rapidly deteriorating walls
of his heart gave way. He was quite lucid, however, unlike most
of her other patients, and very demanding.
She came into the room, and saw that his roommate, Greg
Fielding, had closed the curtain around his bed. She didn't
blame him, for she wouldn't want to look at Mr. Kleiss either, a
balding man with cold blue eyes and a disgustingly flabby neck
like that of a walrus. He combed what little hair he had over
his head and glued it down like a helmet with an odious hairspray
which he kept in his travel kit. She hated men who did that, for
it showed them to be vain and self-important. He was also
impeccably neat, however, and that she was glad of after having
to clean up after Mr. Pitnick, the senile old man in 1221 who
seemed to take great delight in asking for a bedpan after it was
too late. Oscar Kleiss kept his belongings neatly arranged on
the window sill next to his bed, his travel kit precisely lined
up with his cleaning supplies for his contact lenses. On the
other side of the bed was a table with several tattered old books
he had brought with him.
Karen had looked at them briefly while he was at surgery the
day before, but they had appeared to be in Latin, which she had
taken briefly in college and remembered no better than her high
school french. Opening one of them briefly, it fell open to an
old woodcut picture, in which a witch doctor was cutting open the
skulls of two people and appeared to be switching or removing the
brains. She shut the book in disgust, disturbed by the gruesome
scene. Carmen, one of the older nurses on the floor, had later
told her that the books were old religious texts that Kleiss had
brought from Germany, not Christian works, but older, darker
ones. "They are filth," Carmen had confided to Karen, "He should
not be allowed to bring evil works such as those into this
country."
Karen tried to calm her down, but Carmen was from an old
world family and apparently still carried some of the
superstitions with her that she had learned from her family while
growing up in one of the innumerable farm villages that dotted
the countryside of Spain.
"That picture you saw," she said vehemently, "it is Koku
Kelu, ritual of switching brain from one body to another,
performed by African witch doctors. Those books are manuals of
witchcraft and sorcery, they tell him how to steal spirit of
others, to perform the forbidden rituals, how to take over their
bodies. His body is failing, he wants another."
She had laughed at Carmen, but now, in the darkness of
Kleiss's room her superstitions didn't seem to be quite as
far-fetched. His reading light was on, and she glanced at her
watch as she walked across the room. 'Three o'clock,' she sighed
to herself. She was going to have to be here for another four
and a half hours before she could get away from Kleiss and his
creepy books. Mr. Kleiss's piggy eyes fixed icily on her as she
walked over, and he waited until she was within arm's reach
before he spoke. "I'd like a pair of scissors," he said blandly,
his eyes unblinking. "Do you have a pair I could borrow?" He
reached out with a flabby hand to touch her arm and she moved it
away, shuddering involuntarily.
Looking at his pale face, his eyes sunken into the flesh
like two marbles, she didn't want to give him the scissors. She
didn't know why, but she felt that it would be a big mistake.
"Shouldn't you get some sleep, Mr. Kleiss?" she asked, in an
attempt to sidestep his question. "It's after three o'clock."
"It doesn't really matter, does it." It was more of a
statement than a question, and Karen felt her skin crawl at the
sound of his voice rasping out of his throat. He was only
fifty-two, but he had the speech of a man twenty years older.
"We both know that either a donor organ is found and I live or
one is not found and I die." He had the careful enunciation of
someone who learned English as a second language, and Karen
looked away as she answered.
"I'm sure that a donor organ will be found," she said,
trying to sound reassuring. She reached into the pocket of her
scrubs and pulled out her scissors. They were short and blunt,
with a heavy angled blade that had a diamond shaped tip to help
cut bandages. "These are meant to cut gauze and tape, but
they'll probably work fine on paper," she said, nodding at the
Wall Street Journal folded on the bed. 'You do want to cut
paper, don't you?' she almost asked, but she bit her lip instead,
and remained silent.
Karen backed away from him, not wanting to turn her back,
and turned and walked out of the room. She looked over her
shoulder at the door, and saw him clipping an article from the
front page of the Journal with short precise motions, almost like
those of a surgeon. She shivered and walked out of the room,
shutting the door firmly behind her.
Back at the desk, she tapped Cindy on the shoulder, smiling
a little as she jumped. "What is it?" she asked, annoyed.
"What does Greg think of Oscar Kleiss?" Karen asked. Greg
Fielding didn't really belong on this floor. He'd been in a
motorcycle accident and had broken his left arm and both his
legs, but Orthopedics, five floors down, was full and they had
several patients here. He was handsome, in a crude sort of way,
but he wasn't Karen's type, anyways. She didn't know what her
type was, now that she thought about it, for she had never had a
really serious relationship, and the notion made her
uncomfortable.
"You mean Kleiss's roommate? He thinks he's a creep.
Kleiss is always muttering things in German and generally being a
pain in the ass." Karen sat down and Cindy leaned towards her.
"Greg says he's into some weird religion, and he's always
chanting and gesturing when he thinks Greg's asleep. He's got
some tiny medallion that looks like an octopus, and he always
prays to it." Cindy brushed back her hair with her right hand
and went back to her book.
Karen nodded pensively and sat down at the desk. Taking out
Kleiss's file, she leafed through it, its pages glowing green in
the light of the monitor in front of Cindy, but it showed nothing
interesting, so she put it back and leaned back in her chair
yawning as she watched the EKG traces move slowly across the
screen.
She was drifting across a dark landscape, floating as if on
a cushion of air. It was day, but the dark clouds, crowding the
sky above, let little light shine on the alien landscape. Below
her were pathways of black stone, travelling through a forest of
twisted, bizarre trees like palm trees with broad, fern-like
fronds and stout trunks with serrated edges like the skin of a
lizard. The stone gleamed wetly in the dim light like black
glass, and she saw that the path over which she was travelling
led towards a tall tower in the distance, its outline hazy in the
drizzle falling around her.
There were no familiar shapes, and she couldn't get any idea
of size or distance, because all of the plants were so alien.
Once she thought she saw something moving in the forest below, a
huge six-legged thing, but it was gone before she could get a
good look at it.
She swept down so that she was travelling along the pathway,
the squat trees flickering past on either side of her. She
approached the tower, and she could make out some details of its
construction; it was make of cyclopean blocks of greenish stone,
and its surface was barren of features except for a massive
wooden door, bound with heavy strips of iron and brass, at which
the pathway ended. She floated up to the door and stopped.
It towered over her, ten feet tall, and it was locked with
an elaborate mechanism, the workings of which she was unable to
fathom. Karen began to hear a faint piping, like that of the
wind over the mouths of empty bottles. It became louder, and
developed into a maniacal tune. She likened it to the playing of
an insane flutist, and the sound sent a shiver up her spine, for
she could not imagine anything more distorted and eerie than the
notes emanating from beyond the door.
Looking at the door more closely, she saw that it was
covered with markings that seemed vaguely familiar, and she was
reminded of a course in calculus she had taken at school. They
seemed to move of their own accord and her eyes were drawn to
them, unable to turn away. The door seemed to have a handle, one
that she hadn't noticed before, and she reached out to touch it.
'No!' her mind shouted, but her hand reached out against her
will, and as she felt the cool metal of the handle under her
fingers, she heard something beyond the door, a thump as of flesh
against wood.
She wanted to jerk her hand back, but she seemed unable to
move as the pounding continued on the far side of the door. The
insane piping increased in intensity, and it seemed to be inside
her head, driving her crazy. As she looked at the lock and the
door, she realized that it wasn't meant to keep something out, it
was meant to keep something IN.
The thing battering on the far side of the door was large;
she could see the door shaking in its frame as it beat upon the
wooden beams of the far side. She heard a sharp crack, and saw a
split in one of the mammoth boards. One of the hinges slowly
peeled back like the lid of a sardine can, and its massive bolts
each over a foot long, fell to the hard surface of the path, the
noise barely audible over the pounding on the door. One of the
boards split, splinters flying and stinging her hands and face.
She caught a glimpse of something black and wet, and then a huge
eye looked out through the jagged hole, freezing her in terror,
an inky pool of darkness with no white and no iris, just a black
unseeing void. It stared at her fixedly for what seemed an
eternity, and then the door burst asunder, timbers flying in all
directions.
Karen woke with a start. She looked around her at the
familiar surroundings, shaken by the nightmare. Looking at the
readout on the EKG, she saw that it was 3:27; she'd only been
asleep for about twenty minutes. Blinking the sleep out of her
eyes, she looked around. Cindy was nowhere in sight, but she had
left her book, Ebony Nights, on the desk. On the cover was a
painting of a muscular black man and a half dressed woman, her
mouth open in ecstasy. She frowned and got up unsteadily. "That
dream was bizarre," she said loud, her voice loud in the silence
of the nursing station. The EKG trace continued its slow path
across the screen, and she noticed that Greg's was a flatline
again. Even though he wasn't a heart patient, it was hospital
policy that all patients on N-12 be monitored, so he was hooked
up to the central console just like all of the cardiac patients.
He knew that it wasn't necessary, though, and had a habit of
taking it off when he wanted to get some sleep. Cindy must have
gone to hook it up again.
On impulse she felt Cindy's chair - it was cool. 'That's
weird,' she said to herself. 'How come she didn't wake me when
she left the desk if she was going to be gone for so long?'
Deciding to check on Greg herself, she went down the hall towards
room 1213. As she got there, she saw that the door was ajar.
"Cindy," she called softly, "are you in there?" She pushed the
door open and walked quietly into the room. She could smell a
musty odor, as of incense, cloyingly think in the air, and she
sneezed. 'Someone's going to be in trouble,' she said to
herself. Incense wasn't allowed. She saw Mr. Kleiss's body
motionless under the sheets, and she turned to Greg's bed, around
which the curtains were still drawn. She grasped the edge of the
curtain, and pulled, revealing the bed beyond with Greg's still
body in it. As she took a step forward towards the bed, the door
shut behind her, the snick of the latch amplified by the silence.
The room was plunged into darkness, the only light coming from
the muted city lights beyond the closed shades.
She stopped for a moment to let her eyes adjust as much as
possible to the dim light, and continued towards the wall behind
the bed, groping in front of her for the pull string of the lamp
above the headboard.
Karen heard a noise behind her, the scuff of a slipper on
the floor. "Mr. Kleiss, are you up?" she asked. She turned,
trying to see in the dim light, but was unable to make out the
shape of anything except the dim blur of the white curtain
surrounding the bed, and the sound was not repeated. She felt
for the side of the bed, and groped along towards the head of the
bed, feeling for the lamp with her left hand. She felt something
sticky and moist with her right hand. "Shit," she muttered,
smiling grimly at her unintentional pun. Greg had suffered
internal injuries in his accident, and wasn't always able to
control his bowel movements. Now she had gone and stuck her hand
in it. Funny she hadn't smelled it, though.
She saw the dim blob of the lamp in front of her face, its
white shade a dim blur against the dark wall behind. She turned
the lamp on.
It took her stunned mind a moment to react. Greg Fielding
lay on his right side, his eviscerated body tied to the bed with
strips of white cloth and a gag in his mouth. His internal
organs lay in a pile at Karen's feet, neatly arranged in a
circle, his intestines laid over each other to form a
five-pointed star inside the circle. She brought her hand up and
saw the blood on it and the blood on the wall beyond, strange
symbols and drawings that stained its surface a deep crimson.
She realized that she was standing in a slowly spreading pool of
blood, and was beginning to back away when the hand grasped her
shoulder.
She gasped and jerked away, slipping on the slick floor and
falling onto the bed, onto the stiffening body. She saw Oscar
Kleiss standing above her, grinning a toothy, bloody grin. His
hospital johnny was smeared with blood and it clung to his
porcine body like a wet towel. Unable to take her eyes off of
that bloody grin, she rolled to the far side of the bed, slipping
to the floor. She banged her knee on the hard linoleum, and the
pain made her gasp as she staggered to her feet. She backed away
from him, towards the window, hoping to make room so that she
could dodge around him. She backed into a chair and fell into it
with a gasp, and she sat for a moment, stunned. He continued to
come forward, his movements slow and precise, and she realized
that he must be weak after all of the bed rest.
She glanced to her left, towards Kleiss's bed, and froze,
for lying in his bed was Cindy, her corpse disfigured in the same
way as Greg's had been, the empty husk carefully arranged so that
nothing untoward was visible from the hall. Karen felt her mind
starting to spin, and she got up out of the chair, tottering
toward the door, heedless of the thing in her way. She shook her
head in an attempt to clear it, and tried to dodge around him.
He grasped her arm in a deceptively strong grip, his yellowed
nails digging into her wrist, but she fought him off and sprinted
towards the closed door. As she grasped the cool steel handle,
she let out a sob. Oscar Kleiss had the same inky pools of
darkness for eyes that she had seen on that thing in her dream.
John Mason was trying to keep himself awake at the security
desk by playing his walkman full volume. He knew that he'd catch
hell if he got caught, but he'd get in even worse trouble if he
was found sleeping, and he'd forgotten his Vivarin. He didn't
hear Karen come out of the elevator, and let out a little
involuntary yell when he saw her. He jerked off the headset, and
it fell, unseen, to the floor. "What the hell happened?" he
asked, his eyes widening at the sight of her hospital scrubs,
saturated with blood. "Should I call the police?"
"Yes, yes, right away," she shrieked. She was sobbing with
her hands over her face, and was covered in blood; it was in her
hair, on her face, and it looked like it had even gotten in her
mouth; as she talked, he caught glimpses of teeth reddened by
clotting blood. John felt the bile rising in his throat, and
fought to keep it down as he dialed 911. "I've got to get out of
here!" she said hysterically, and she staggered towards the
revolving door to the outside.
"Wh-what happened?" he asked nervously. He glanced over the
counter, and saw that she had left bloody footprints behind her
from the elevator.
"He's crazy! He's crazy!" she shrieked, and she fled into
the night. John saw that she had left two bloody hand prints on
the revolving door, and as it slowly stopped spinning, the blood
dripped down the door, looking like a child's fingerpainting.
John realized that he wasn't going to be able to hold down the
gorge rising in his throat, and dropped the phone, fumbling for
the trash can under the desk.
As he vomited the contents of his stomach into it, reviling
at the bitter taste in his mouth, he could hear a voice on the
other end of the line. "Hello," it said. "May I help you?
Hello? Hello?"
Karen found her car in the parking garage, a black Mazda
MX-6, and fumbled in her purse for her keys, her fingers slippery
with slowly congealing blood. Clumsily unlocking the door, she
got in and started the engine. Then she glanced in the rear view
mirror. Her hair was matted with blood, and it slowly dripped
down her face and off of her chin.
She smiled, her inky black eyes gleaming in the darkness, and drove away into the night.