11. Horror Hospital
eleven
Horror Hospital
Liam
The lights cut, a scream slices through the dark, people are shouting, and I have no idea what’s happening.
It’s pitch black. I don’t know if it’s afternoon or evening now; we’ve been in this windowless room for so long and we’re too deep inside the hospital for any natural light to reach us.
My phone must have gone flat, because I’m getting nothing more than a dark screen. But no one else seems to be turning theirs on either.
The voice of what’s presumably a nurse reaches me from across the room, telling everyone to stay calm. Someone falls, smacks against my legs, and goes down with a whole lot of swearing. I drop to try to help, feeling blindly for them. “Are you all right?”
“It touched me! I felt it! It’s after me!”
“What is?”
But they scramble away, out of reach, back into darkness. People are crying, shouting about something I just can’t see.
Then everything goes quiet.
Pin-drop quiet.
Dead quiet.
It’s as if every person who was here one second ago has been raptured out of existence, and it’s just me, left alone, in this dark and silent hospital.
“Hello?” My voice echoes like I’m in some huge, cavernous space, not the cramped waiting room of the last several hours.
Then, a strange, echoing clicking sound fills the air, and my heart slams to life, pounding against my ribs. It’s like the sound of an insect but too deep. Too loud. Distant, but also not, reverberating all around.
Something touches my arm, and I spin away from it, into the black of the empty space, not a thing to guide me. “Who’s there?”
A sharp, icy, finger-like point sinks into my arm.
“What the fuck?” I flinch away from it, whirling around, blind.
It’s at my hip now—that same sharp-cold feeling, like a skeleton hand taking hold of me from behind. I try to push it away, but it isn’t attached to anything—not an arm, not a person. I can’t grip a thing to get it off, even sliding my hand hard against my skin. It’s got me.
My body shudders, reacts of its own accord, and I jump forward, slipping from the ghostly grasp.
It finds my back, a hand laid flat against my skin, then another, a fingertip, reaching around—a frigid finger running along my jawline.
“Liam…” My name comes out of nowhere, everywhere, clicking like the insect noise. Inside my head, outside my head.
“Who are you?”
No reply meets my words.
The fingertip slides down my jaw, finding my neck, then splits apart, five long fingers spreading over my throat, rooting me to the spot.
The emergency lights flicker on—a glow that starts barely there, then brighter, brighter, until it lights the room enough to see that I’m really alone. All alone. Alone in this dark hospital with these spectral hands on me and…
I turn my head slowly. I don’t want to. I can’t bear to.
But I feel the presence there, so close by my cheek.
I know it’s there. Even while I know these hands touching me are attached to nothing.
Ghostly fingers tracing down my spine, over my hip, and me alone in this abandoned hospital room, and not a sound but that clicking.
Loud and echoing clicking, all around, inside my head, outside my head.
Still, I turn, slowly. And the face that meets mine…
It’s barely visible in the light, glistening black like onyx, but across its eyes and its mouth rip two pale bands of bright white. Bone white. A huge grin of exposed teeth is ripped wide across its fleshless face, and in the eye sockets… two red and glowing, evil orbs.
The scream races up my throat, the hand tightens, clenches, suffocates it…
“Liam!” At the sound of Archer’s voice, the face evaporates, the hands melt away. Archer’s arms come around me. There’s only a flash of him, and I’m wrapped, bundled, whirled around and away from where the thing was.
It’s a heartbeat of warmth, safety, relief, but all too soon, Archer steps back, drops his hands to my arms, and with his face an inch from mine, he’s telling me, “It’s not real. Everything you’re seeing right now is a hallucination. I need you to trust me, and I need you to come with me.”
I can barely process a thing, least of all such bizarre words. “What?”
“Don’t give into it,” he insists loudly, forcefully, like I might want to go back into the clutches of whatever that was. His hand lands on my cheek, and he looks deep into my eyes. “I need you to put your complete trust in me right now.”
I’m not hallucinating. I can’t be. This is real. Solid and real and true. Archer is real and true. I can feel him. And that clicking sound. I can hear it again, plain and clear, all around me, inside me.
I look for the thing that’s making it, for that skeleton face I just saw, that just had a hold of me.
“Liam!” Archer snaps, his fingers digging into my shoulders. “Do exactly as I tell you.”
I drop a slight nod. It’s all the reaction I can conjure.
He takes my hand, and we head for the exit. Or where I thought the exit was. Because now it’s not that. And even though I just told Archer I’d follow him, my feet dig into the floor, and I come to a resolute stop.
The doorway is still there, but the door is closed now, and the little windows that should show a hospital walkway on the other side are pale, terrifying.
Fog presses against them, swirling, some phantom breeze disturbing leaves, branches, that scratch and scrape against the glass creating an eerie soundtrack.
Then, just for a second, scuttling along the edge, the huge, hairy legs of what looks like an enormous spider.
“Liam, you have to come.” Archer’s voice is strong, and his eyes, scanning the room over my shoulder, show a fierceness I wouldn’t have thought him capable of when I first laid eyes on him this morning.
I thought he was some posh, mad antiques dealer.
But Archer isn’t that at all. And the knowledge makes my hand grip his a little tighter, some strange sense of safety shoring up my stomach, even as my feet refuse to move.
“Liam.” His hand’s back on my cheek, and the shock of it cuts through my fear. “Tell me what you’re seeing, honey.”
Did he just call me honey?
Okay, maybe this is a hallucination after all. But I think I like that part. So it will be a shame when that bit’s over. The rest of this, though…
“The hallway’s gone,” I tell him, scanning that forbidding doorway. “It’s… not what it was. It’s trees. Or branches. An-and spiders. I think. Or maybe just one.”
“Spiders?”
“Like…” I check again, but I can’t see it now. “Like a tarantula. A really big tarantula.”
“Fuck,” he whispers. “Are you very scared of spiders?”
“I’m… I think I’m a normal amount scared of spiders. Especially ones that materialise out of nowhere in the hospital. And of why that hallway isn’t a hallway.”
“Hallucination,” he says. Then he adds, “Stay behind me.”
When he turns away from me, he keeps his hand in mine, his arm twisted behind his back, and he holds me close.
I’m ashamed to admit how badly I want to sink against his back, like I wanted to earlier today, but maybe ten times as desperately now.
Still, that shame doesn’t stop me curling closer to him with every step we take, every inch we move towards to that doorway.
His hand touches down on it, and I brave a peek over his shoulder.
“Whatever we see in here,” he says, “we have to keep going. Don’t let go of my hand, and just keep moving.”
“Why is this happening?” I whisper. “Is it… did we eat something?” Because I don’t remember having a thing other than crisps from the emergency room vending machine and far, far too much tea.
“Not here,” he replies. “We’ll talk about this when we’re out.”
His words send a shiver down my spine. ‘Not here.’ Maybe like someone will hear us. Maybe like that thing…
But it’s a hallucination, Archer said. It has to be. So why should it matter who hears us?
I glance back over my shoulder just as Archer pushes the door open—just as that clicking sound engulfs us. There’s nothing but that dark, empty room behind us. So we walk on and into this… this place.
Hot and humid air curls all around us, the fog I saw through the window reaching out like tentacles to slide over my cheeks and arms. A rich and cloying scent, like some sort of incense, wafts on the air, undercut by…
Is that tobacco? And beneath it all, a dank mustiness, like old autumn leaves, forest foliage, and something else.
Something I can’t place, but that makes my skin crawl.
The memory of that skeletal touch pokes at me, and I move closer to Archer. But Archer… He leans forward, ducking down beneath a branch.
And when he does it, my heart just about smashes to a stop. “You can see it too.”
“It’s okay.” He reaches out, fingers sinking into an enormous cobweb that blocks our path, the sound of it crackling perfectly real in my ears as he pulls it down.
Part of me wants to run away—to go back, even if this is the way to the exit—the only way out.
But I cling to him, my other hand slipping over his hip as if it has a mind of its own, while something inside me recoils from the knowledge that he can see this too.
That he’s calling it a hallucination, which it has to be because this is insane, but why can he see it?
Something catches my eye, off to the right, behind the wispy swirls of fog.
It’s the wall. A wall made of stone. No longer the plastic-looking hospital wall, it’s stone.
Pale stone, with carvings, but I can’t make out what they are through the obscuring grey.
They’re inlaid with colour—aqua, gold, black—glinting in the meagre light.