I didn’t go outside. I knew of no way I could help Jarvis, and I was terrified by what I was seeing. So instead I called 911 and waited by the window as the contractor’s thrashing finally slowed and then stilled. The men around him had grown quiet now, standing motionless for several minutes until as one they began to glance at each other with some degree of confusion. There were four men out there aside from Jarvis, and I could have sworn from their expressions that they didn’t understand what was going on or what they were doing. But they didn’t move to help Jarvis either. Instead, they went slowly back to digging the hole as though their companion wasn’t laying a few feet away, dead or dying.
They looked up dazedly at the approach of ambulance and deputy sirens, not showing any real apprehension or concern. Moving to the front door, I ran out and waved at the approaching vehicles, pointing around to the back of the house. The next few minutes were a flurry of activity. I was kept at the front of the house talking to a deputy, but I caught glimpses as two EMTs loaded Jarvis, still somehow alive, into the back of the ambulance while two other deputies questioned his men.
For my part, I told Deputy Ellison that I had seen Jarvis having a seizure and clawing at his face, and that his men had seemed to be acting strangely, but that I had not seen any of them actually try to hurt or help the man. All of this was true, but I left out any mention of the coffin or what we had found inside. I had thought about whether to go into these extra details with law enforcement or the EMTs while I waited for them to arrive, having given only bare bones details to the 911 operator when I called it in.
In my estimation, one of two things was true. Either there was something supernatural and sinister going on here or there wasn’t. If there was, me telling other people about it would do little good except undermine my credibility and possibly have the other writings I hadn’t looked at yet taken away from me. If everything had a mundane explanation, then the coffin and its contents were likely irrelevant. Even if the coffin had contained some kind of toxin, they would likely find it through testing Jarvis.
I knew there were holes in my reasoning, but I was still possessed by the feeling that the dire warning I had read was earnest and true, which meant I needed to assume I was dealing with something that I didn’t understand and that wouldn’t be understood by the average doctor or cop as well. So I held things back, hoping it would all go away but knowing in the recesses of my heart that I wouldn’t be so lucky.
Twenty minutes later I was driving to the hospital. Before I had left home, one of the other deputies had come up and told Ellison that the other men had given very little in the way of statements beyond that Jarvis had started having some kind of fit and they didn’t know why. The deputy said with a meaningful look that based on their responses and demeanor, he had suggested they all get checked out medically, but they had refused treatment and started leaving the work site once he was done with his questions.
Ellison had clenched his jaw and nodded. “Just make sure you have all those birds’ info so we can talk to them again.” Turning to me, his expression softened slightly. “I can’t make them see the doctor and don’t have any reason to arrest them, but this is all very fishy sounding. I appreciate your help, and I’ll be talking again to you soon.”
I knew that Ellison didn’t entirely trust what I had told him either, and I didn’t blame him. As I turned into the hospital parking lot, I went back through what I had said for the tenth time, wanting to make sure I hadn’t left out anything that might be helpful while not delving into those things I felt I needed to keep to myself.
Not able to think of anything, I stepped out of my car and headed into the visitor’s entrance to the ER. I had hoped to see some of his workers coming to check on Jarvis as well, as that would at least give some indication of them having returned to normal, but no one came. For the next two hours I sat on an orange chair of molded plastic in the outdated and stale-smelling waiting room, my only company the drone of some afternoon talk show from a ceiling-mounted t.v. and a sad-looking old woman who sat on the opposite end of the room.
I wasn’t even sure why I was there other than I felt somehow responsible for what had happened to Jarvis and I hoped that by staying I might either get some answers or at least absolve myself of some guilt. After the first hour, a doctor came out and told me that they had him stable and sedated, and they were planning on doing surgery that evening, but that since I wasn’t family, it would probably be at least a day or two before I’d be able to go in and see him. When I asked if his eyes were going to be okay, the doctor had just given me a bleak look and said he couldn’t discuss any medical details with me while shaking his head slowly side to side.
I felt sick to my stomach as he left. I debated leaving then, but I didn’t really want to go back home and had no where else to be. So I sat, turning things over in my mind for several minutes before realizing with a start that I had the pages from the coffin with me. I had been worried about the deputies finding them, so I had gently folded and tucked them into my back pocket before they arrived. Pulling them out now, I glanced again at the page of screaming warnings before setting it aside. As far as I could tell, the rest of the sheets of paper were all one long letter, so I started reading it from the beginning as the day outside passed through soft twilight in its journey toward darkness.
To Whom It May Concern,
My name is Emily Thurman. I write this in the bedroom that has served as my prison for nearly twenty years, or at least as a cell within the larger prison that is this house, this family, this existence. I was treated well-enough for the first two decades of my life, for during that period I played the role of a dutiful daughter in a well-to-do family as was expected. When my uncle Frederick attempted to interfere with me sexually was the night that my troubles began.
He was not held to account thanks to my father’s misogyny and my mother’s desire for her brother’s favor and business acumen. Even then our family was heading for shallower waters financially, and this was more than two decades before the collapse of 1929. For my part, I was treated coldly for my accusations if not called an outright liar. This caused me more than a little distress, but I had resolved to marshal my resources and leave the cooling embrace of my family for leaner, but hopefully greener, pastures elsewhere as soon as possible.
Then one night in January of 1909, three months after the incident with my uncle, I found myself woken roughly by strange men. My first thoughts were of robbery or abduction, but as I was carried through the house I saw my family standing by and watching. Father looked troubled but stood silent. Mother and Frederick stared blankly into the distance as I was carried by them, screaming and thrashing against my captors. It was all for naught. I was thrust into a waiting motor car that marked the beginning of my journey to Greenheart Home.
Greenheart Home, as I would soon learn, was a private institution tucked away like a handmaiden’s secret in the black woods of northern California. One could call it a mental ward, a retreat, or a prison and not be wrong. But Greenheart’s true purpose was as a place of forgetting. Wealthy and prominent families would send their troubled children, their embarrassing parents, their undesirable mistakes to Greenheart, and there they would stay under the guise of mercy and the pretense of establishment.
My official diagnosis at Greenheart Home was “melancholia and female disease”, as though being a woman was some kind of blight in and of itself. Those first few weeks I railed against every encounter, demanding my freedom or at least to speak to someone in control. Over time I learned that my freedom had died as soon as I spoke out against my uncle, and that whoever was in control, the salient point was that it was not me.
This led, as one might imagine, to a period of depression. Greenheart was not an unpleasant place aesthetically, as keeping up appearances and salving the conscience of those families that dumped their refuse here required a certain veneer of comfort and respectability. But a gilded cage is still a cage, and I wanted no part of any of it. My attempts to escape were foiled, and eventually my period of despair became burdensome in its own right, so one day I woke up resolved to make a kind of life in that place.
I had shunned most social contact since my arrival, but once I opened myself up to the other women there, I found several fast friends. Just to be able to talk to people again, particularly others that shared my plight, was a blessing. In some ways, the next two years were the best of my life, as bizarre as that might seem from the outside. Living at Greenheart was much like living most places, in that eventually you grow accustomed to things you would have never thought possible.
At any given time there were around 150 women and young girls at Greenheart Home, and the fact that periodically people would be gone without warning, never to return, seemed strange but not sinister. We would be told their family had sent for them and that would be the end of it. We had no way to dispute it, and no recourse even if we had the desire. It wasn’t until later that we began to realize what was really happening to our fellow inmates.
The ruler of that terrible little kingdom was a man named Dr. Chester Middleton, a psychologist of some esteem to hear the nurses tell it, though the only times we ever saw him was passing through as he spoke to this nurse or that orderly, occasionally at mandated functions, and the night of the fire that ended it all in 1911. But even before that night, there was always a tension in the air at Greenheart. A hidden power struggle between two unlikely opponents: The head doctor and the gardener.
Elias Meeks was a large and sullen man with a stormy disposition and a thick Eastern European accent that seemed to come and go depending on whether he wanted you to understand his dark mutterings or not. He had apparently been the groundskeeper at Greenheart Home for a number of years, and to a person, everyone seemed to be terrified of him. Mostly this was a subtle thing—the staff would avoid him whenever possible, avoiding his eyes when he approached. For Meeks’ part, he radiated a feeling of menace like living heat, but I never saw him be actively cruel or violent with anyone, which was more than I could say for some of the nurses and orderlies.
But that did little to lessen our fear of him. We would watch him cutting the grass or repairing the roof, and my small group of friends would instinctively pull closer together as we hustled past. He would occasionally take special care with the private cemetery at the edge of the grounds, and it was from this that he earned the nickname that we all called him by when he was out of earshot. The Gravekeeper.
I let out a small gasp as I felt my cellphone vibrating in my pocket. Pulling it out, I didn’t recognize the number but decided I should answer given the day I was having. It was Deputy Ellison.
“Where are you at, Mr. Sullivan?”
“I’m still at the hospital. The ER waiting room. Why?”
There was a pause and I could tell the deputy was debating how much he should say. Letting out a deep breath, he went on. “Because out of those four guys out there with you and Jarvis today, two of them went home and murdered their families in the last hour. We’ve got BOLOs out on the other two, and I was about to put one out on you if I couldn’t get ahold of you.”
I couldn’t breathe. How was any of this possible? I…
“You still there, Mr. Sullivan?”
“Yes…yes, I’m here. They…they killed their families?”
I could hear the weariness in the other man’s voice. “Yeah. Worse thing I’ve ever seen. We had to shoot one of them down and the other is still holed up in his house, but as far as we can tell, we have at least six dead so far. Seven if Jarvis doesn’t make it.”
I was about to tell him what the doctor had told me when the lights went out, plunging the waiting room into total darkness. After a moment a couple of security lights flickered on fitfully, but no more. Looking around, I saw no people or any of the normal noises I would expect in a hospital. Even the little old woman had left at some point. It was like I was in a tomb.
“Deputy…the power just went out here in the hospital. It’s dark.”
Another moment of contemplative silence and then his voice was back, shot through with anger and fear. “That’s impossible. Even if the hospital loses power, the back-up gennies would kick in within less than a second. There’s too much that can go wrong if they really lose power.”
I gritted my teeth as I started slowly making my way to the double-doors that led into the deeper bowels of the hospital. Peering through the narrow windows in the doors, I saw only darkness punctuated by two dim and flickering security lights on my end of the hallway. The other end was utterly black and devoid of life.
“I’m fucking telling you it’s dark. No lights outside either as far as I can tell. And I don’t see any people. It’s like a ghost town in here. I’m leaving, but you should get someone over here.”
“No,” the deputy said, his voice more shrill this time. “You stay put. You’re either a potential victim or a potential suspect, but either way you and me are going to talk more before you go anywhere. On my way.” With that he hung up and I found myself staring dumbfounded at my phone. It took me only a moment of internal debate to decide he could go fuck himself and that I’d see him later when I wasn’t scared out of my mind. Something was terribly wrong here and I was leaving.
That’s when I heard the voice from somewhere deep in the shadows. In the moment it took for me to register it fully, I felt a surge of relief at having contact with another person. Then I realized who was speaking to me from some nearby darkened hall. It was Rick Jarvis. His voice was strange and gravelly, and he had a strange lilt to his words that I didn’t remember from my prior conversations with him, but it was him all right. And he was calling to me.
“I know yer out there, Sully. I may not can see ya, but that’s all right. Yes, that’s all right.” He trailed off in a wet, uneven croon, almost as though he was lost in thought. Then he was back, his voice brighter and closer sounding. “Yeah, I can’t see ya, but I can smell ya, Sully. Just stay where you are and I’ll be with ya shortly.”
My heart thudding in my chest, I turned to run towards the exit just as I heard a metallic clunk ring through the doors. I hit them hard and bounced off, the magnetic locks giving very little as I shoved against them again and again. After my fifth attempt I stopped, forcing myself to slow down and think. Slow down and listen. There had to be emergency exits they couldn’t lock like this. That he couldn’t lock like this. I just had to avoid him for…
“There ya are, my boy.” The voice was right behind me now, loud as a gunshot in the dark. “Now. Let’s get to know each other better.”
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Credits
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