It appears I am getting quite the reputation around here.
Someone came up to my desk today, someone I had never seen before, with a very strange story.
“You're the guy who's writing the book about the Hospital, right? The one they talk about?”
I had been working on a list for the previous day's on-call personnel, trying to get it all together for whoever was working tomorrow, and I looked up to find a woman in scrubs standing beside my desk. She looked terrified, her hands clutching the shoulders of her scrub top. She looked oddly put together to be trying to hold herself together, and I realized that something must have happened recently. This place is like a snake and sometimes it strikes without warning.
“I am,” I said, offering her a chair, “Did you have something you wanted to tell me about.”
She sat, looking around as if she expected to be attacked by someone at any minute.
“I don't know. Carl and David told me that you were collecting stories, and David said it helped to talk about the weirdness sometimes. I'm just hoping for some perspective and maybe some advice. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.”
I told her to have a seat for a few minutes while I finished up, and as I typed she slowly drew her legs up against her chest. Whatever she had seen had really affected her, and she kept jerking her head to look behind her like something might be creeping around. She was terrified, clearly out of her element, and whatever it was had her spooked.
I hit send on the list a few minutes later, opening up a notepad as I prepared to dictate, “Okay, tell me all about it.”
She nodded, peeking at me through her knees and looking very young for a woman that was probably older than I was, “It happened so quickly, but it felt like it ran in slow motion. Do you know how sometimes things get fuzzier the farther it gets from when they happened? This isn't like that. I can remember it perfectly, like a photograph in my head.”
She put her forehead against her knees and the chair creaked a little as she shivered.
“It started when I got to work.”
I've been a nurse for right around ten years. I started on the third floor, but I found that I liked helping out in the OR so I transferred to the surgical department and have loved it ever since. I've had several doctors ask for me to help circulate their cases and as such I usually find myself with a lot of overtime at the end of the month. I was coming in for one such time, called in to help with an emergency procedure, when the trouble started.
I got to work about twenty minutes after they called. It was the middle of the afternoon so I was still awake and just kind of enjoying my weekend. I pulled on some scrubs and drove in, and when I got there, I noticed that no one else was in the change-out room. That seemed odd, surely they wouldn't have started without me, and as I opened my locker, I was in for another surprise.
Someone had taken my coat.
It was just a regular white scrub coat, the kind with lots of pockets and catches, but it also had my spare name tag on it. I looked around to see if maybe I had sent it to laundry by mistake, but it was nowhere to be found. I wasn't terribly worried, I must have just forgotten that I took it home, and I scrubbed up and got ready for the case.
I wondered why they had started without me, and reflected that this wasn't the only time the scrub team had acted weird lately. I was friends outside of work with more than one of them, but they had stopped inviting me out to do things as of late. I had thought maybe they were busy at first, but over time, I realized they were just going out without me. I asked them about it, wondering why they were acting so distant, and they told me that it was me who was acting weird. They would see me in the halls or in the elevator, but I would pretend not to know them or ignore them altogether.
I told them I had no clue what they were talking about, but I don't think they believed me.
I realized I had been wool-gathering as I stood at the sink, and I finished scrubbing out so I could get to work. There was no one in the halls getting things together and I wondered how big of an emergency this had been. They had said emergency, but it just sounded like a car accident. The patient was conscious and really just needed some foreign objects removed so the wounds could be closed. It wasn't a code-blue situation and I couldn't believe they would start without everyone being there.
I walked down the hall to room two and that's when I saw them.
They were all standing around the table, Doctor Carter moving about as the nurses handed him things or helped him with the removal of what appeared to be pieces of a wooden fence. He was saying something to the woman on his left, and as she reached for the tray beside her I realized they had started without me. I was offended, before I did a head count and realized they had a full team in the room. There were seven of them, all people I knew, and at the right hand of Doctor was a woman wearing a familiar white coat with a very familiar silver name badge.
She turned when he said her name, nodding as she reached for something besides her, and that's when I realized that I knew her too.
She was me!
She looked like me, at least as much of her as I could see, and from the eyes to the hairline, she was a dead ringer. She moved a little stiffly, her turns looking mechanical, but other than that, she was me. She never looked my way, there was no sinister crinkling of eyes shared between us or a creepy smile seen from the corners of her mask, but the longer I looked at her, the worse I began to feel.
The feeling is hard to describe, but the closest I can approximate it was a feeling of vertigo. I felt dizzy, my vision shaking a little as I looked at my double. There was a pressure in my ears, something like a change in altitude, and I just knew that if I were to go and talk to her or touch her something terrible would happen. She was me, just as I was me, and we were not supposed to occupy the same place at the same time.
I didn't know what else to do, so I just left.
I walked until I left the OR and came out into the lobby and that's when I saw you and realized you must be the one David was talking about when he said you collected stories. So, here I am, unsure of whether I need to go back and confront the other me or not.
I finished typing, the woman looking at me as if expecting something.
I didn't know what exactly to give her, but I knew who would.
I called Carl and told him there was someone in the OR impersonating a nurse.
He came pretty quickly then, and when he saw the woman sitting at my desk, he called her Carol and pulled up a chair to see what was wrong. The two had known each other for a while, it seemed, and when she told Carl about the missing jacket and the impostor in the OR, he told her to come with him so they could ID the perpetrator.
“I'll make sure you're safe before I apprehend them, but I may need you to ID them so I can have something to tell the police.”
The two left then, Carl and Carol thanking me for the help, but that wasn't quite the end of the story.
I saw a few of the off-duty security guards coming in about thirty minutes later.
No sooner had they come wandering in, than Carl had called me and told me to announce a lockdown.
“Tell them the doors are closed until further notice and no one comes in or out unless cleared by security.”
He had a security team member at every exit, even a couple of blue and whites from the Cashmere Police Department, and they checked those coming in or going out as Carl and some of the other guys searched the hospital.
The lockdown wasn't lifted till after visiting hours were over, and that was when I got the rest of the story.
Carl looked tired as he flopped into his seat beside me, the same one Carol had occupied earlier in the day. He looked tired, clearly doing a lot more leg work than he was used to, and I turned my Youtube video down as I grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge beneath my desk. He accepted it gladly, and I waited till he’d had a couple sips before asking him if everything was okay.
“Yeah, but Carol is pretty shaken up about it. We had someone take her home and check her house, but I don't think she'll be back to work for a little while.”
“So what actually happened?” I asked him, opening the same document so I could take some notes.
Carl looked around like he was afraid someone might see him, “It's pretty bizarre.”
“For this place?” I asked, eliciting a laugh from Carl.
“True, true.” he admitted, “Okay, so after we left,”
Carl and Carol had gone down to the OR so Carol could ID the impostor. When they got there, the OR was in a bit of an uproar. Doctor Carter saw Carol and asked where she had gone and how she had left without anyone noticing.
“We were worried about you.” he said, “One minute you were there, and then the next minute you were gone.”
Carol said that it hadn't been her, that it was a stranger, but Doctor Carter had only shrugged.
“She looked just like you, down to the Disney masks you always wear and the brand of deodorant.”
Carl asked if she had sounded like Carol, but no one seemed to be able to remember if the woman had spoken or not. People had spoken to her, and some of them were sure that she had answered, but they couldn't remember a single interaction with her. She had been passing instruments, had been passing more sutures at the time when Doctor Carter had turned and found her gone.
“No one saw her leave, but she must have. People don't just disappear.”
Carl had called in back up and they had locked the hospital down and searched it from top to bottom. He had one of his officers checking the cameras too, but no one could find the woman leaving the OR area. It was like she had walked into the OR at seven fifteen and never walked out again. It wasn't the strangest thing I had ever heard, but it was definitely up there.
“The weirdest part was where we found the coat.”
“Weirder than a disappearing person?”
“Well, we took Carol back to her locker before we locked down the facility, to see if we could find any evidence of the break-in, but when she opened the locker, the coat was right there like it had never left. Carol looked at it like she couldn't believe it, and when she kinda sat down, I had her sent home. They searched her house for anyone who might have gotten in, but it was clean too. It's the damnedest thing. I believe that she saw what she saw, but to find that coat right there in the locker...I just don't know.”
He went back to it not long after, and I was left to ponder what it had all meant. The Hospital has always been a strange place, but between jumping ghosts, tapping in the morgue, and strange stairwells, the weirdness has escalated beyond anything I've ever heard of. The activity is growing, and I wonder how long it will be before the everyday visitors to the hospital take notice.
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