Tales from Cashmere Hospital: Doppelganger in the OR

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.

--- 

Credits

Tales from Cashmere Hospital: The Man Made of Stars

 

"I can't get it out of my head. I don't know what to do. Mark said you might be able to help me, but I don't know how."

I was sitting by the fountain in the outdoor garden, which most people used as a smoking area. The angel statue held a jug that constantly burbled out water, and I found the patter soothing. I came here to think sometimes, to collect my thoughts, and it was a great comfort to me since the incident with the elevator. I found myself here more and more often these days. Writing this book about the things I've seen and heard in Cashmere Hospital is taking a toll on me, and I think it's impossible to not wonder why I stay in the belly of the beast as I write more and more about the things that go on here.

I was asleep when Mark called me today, dragging myself from the depths to ask what he wanted?

My plans had been to sleep till noon, so I could get up and write a little before going back to sleep tonight. It was my day off, and I wanted to catch up on some sleep so I could spend all day tomorrow writing before going back to work on Wednesday. Instead, I listened to what Mark had to say and got up to make myself a coffee, so I'd be in the right mind to listen to this fellas story.

"He wants to know if you'll meet him at eleven. He sounds pretty bad, and I'm afraid he might not be in the right place to tell you this story for much longer."

The guy's name was Jerry, a "sitter" who'd struck up a friendship with Mark a few months ago.

Sitters are what we call them, but their title is "non-medical caregivers." They sit with patients for six to eight hours daily, and the work is voluntary. Sitters usually hang out with coma patients, patients suffering from catatonia, dementia patients, and most patients who just need someone to sit and talk with them. That was where Jerry came in. Jerry lived primarily off a trust fund, but as he grew older, he wanted to do something with his time besides sit around. So, he committed himself to sit with patients a few times a week, leading him to where he was now.

"They keep calling me to see if I want to sit with another patient, but I can't think of anything besides what he said to me."

I looked up owlishly at him, taking a sip of the coffee I'd bought in the cafeteria before telling him to go on.

"It all started with Mr. Vogner."

* * * * *

Jerry looked at the starring old man without much interest. He was sitting in a bed on the second floor, the long-term stay unit, and staring at the same long crack in the plain white paint that covered a ceiling that had likely not been painted since Reagan was in office.

"This is Mr. Vogner. He's in a coma, but we think he might feel a little better if he just had someone to talk to."

Jerry nodded, "Well, let's get acquainted then,"

After several hours of having a one-sided conversation with the man in the bed, Jerry sighed. He didn't know what he was expecting. Most of the patients in a coma or in a state of catatonia were like this. It was like talking to a brick wall, but you ultimately did it for them. You gave them a voice they could latch onto, a lifeline that might pull them back from whatever sea they are stranded in.

Just because it was dull didn't mean it wasn't noble work.

Jerry had been doing this sort of thing for about a year, and he had never seen anything described by some of the guys in his group. There was a collection of guys in the Sitter program who sometimes got together for drinks and talked about their experiences. Some of the guys talked about watching patients slowly come out of their silent state. Some talked about hearing a patient speak for the first time in years. Some talked about the tear-spotted letters they got from their families or the happy embraces from family members who hadn't seen them move or speak in years. Jerry didn't have anything like this. They told him it would happen, that he would get his own story to tell one day.

He doubted any of them could have known that this dried-up husk of a man would be his one and only story.

Jerry tried another conversational gambit, asking Mr. Vogner who he thought would win the Super Bowl this year?

Mr. Vognar just kept staring at that crack in the ceiling.

Jerry reached for the remote then, thinking some Tv might loosen his tongue. Flipping through the channels, he finally settled on an episode of Pawn Stars and started watching the adventures of Rick and his son, Big Haus. Jerry asked Vogner if he liked Pawn Stars, but he got no answer. Whether he approved or disapproved, Jerry never knew. He turned back to the show, commenting on some of the things they were showing, and the two let the show play out.

They were halfway through the episode, Rick's father talking to a man about silver coins, when Jerry heard the mumbling. He turned the volume down, thinking it might be part of the show, and realized it was coming from the man in the bed. Mr. Vogner was mumbling to the crack in the ceiling, and Jerry turned off the tv as he slid his chair a little closer. The man's chapped lips were mumbling the same thing repeatedly, and as Jerry got closer, he realized it was the same five words.

"He came through the crack."

"Are you okay, Mr. Vogner?" Jerry asked, looking at the door as he thought about calling a nurse.

"He came through the crack."

"Do you need some water?" Jerry asked, hoping for more than muttering.

"He came through the crack."

"Who came through the crack?" Jerry asked on a whim, wondering if it was something more than a random phrase.

When the old man turned his sunken face towards him, his chapped lips flaking as he made the words of an answer, Jerry wished he hadn't asked.

"The man made of stars."

Jerry wanted to pull away but leaned in closer, curious to hear the man's words.

"Tell me about him."

It all began when things started going missing.

It was little things. My paper weight, the pen the college gave me after teaching for twenty years, the pendent from LSU that hung on the wall of my own dorm, and I was becoming angry. I blamed my kids, and I blamed my wife, but they all claimed they had nothing to do with it. I was working on a manuscript and complained that all of this was cutting into my time, but still, things continued to go missing.

When my manuscript started going missing, I fell into a rage.

I changed the locks on my office. I forbade people to go in there, even when I was there. I spent more time in my office, typing and typing and typing away, and barely saw the people who mattered the most to me. I would slink out to get food in the dead of night when everyone was asleep, and even then, I would lock the door and get back to work as quickly as possible.

I was typing one night between midnight and dawn when I discovered what had been stealing from me.

The old man wet his lips again, his head shifting slowly as he looked back at the crack in the ceiling. His voice sounded like a rusty hinge in a haunted house, and Jerry wondered how long it had been since he had spoken? Jerry wanted to get him some water, but he was pulled in by the weird story and the sound of his haggard voice.

"Have you ever considered what we would look like to a two-dimensional creature?"

Jerry was surprised, shook his head, shocked into a response by the strangeness of the question.

"Few do. A three-dimensional creature could reach right into a safe that a two-dimensional creature had secured and take anything they wanted. The two-dimensional creature would have no idea how its valuables had been stolen, and it might not even be able to conceive of a three-dimensional creature."

"Pretty heavy stuff," Jerry said, chuckling weakly.

"Indeed," said Mr. Vognar, "Especially when it's exactly what's happening to you."

I was sitting at my computer, banging away at my missing pages as I tried to recreate them when something caught my eye. It began as a sparkling, like a gem that caught the light, and I turned to look at the crack that had appeared on my wall. It was nothing special, just a normal crack, but there was something trying to push its way through. I… can't…have you ever looked up at the stars on a clear night? Have you ever looked at the constellations and seen the shapes? That one bear, that one a dipper, that one a huntsman? Well, I saw a man made of stars! That's as close as I can describe him, but it looked like a constellation had stepped out of my wall.

I was speechless. Was this the thing that was stealing from me? I was like a statue as it moved across the room. It's hard to describe how it moved. It almost seemed to vanish and reappear with each "step." It was, then it wasn't, then it was again. Watching it move gave me the worst feeling of nausea, and I felt the air hang in my lungs as it came right up to the desk. It stood not five feet from me, and the air hummed with power. I spent a summer working for the power company before college, hanging power lines and helping plant telephone poles. When the wires were live, they felt just like that, and I was afraid that if it touched me, I'd be burnt to a crisp.

I must have made a sound when he picked up the picture on my desk because it turned and looked at me. I say turned, but I'm not quite sure what it did. It folded itself in my direction, and when its shining visage fell on me, it sounded like animals being cooked alive. It sounded like the loudest speaker reverb you've ever heard mixed with a pig being butchered. It made my ears bleed, and I felt blood oozing from my nose and eyes as I stared at it. I watched it lean in closer and closer as the noise fell on me like a heavy weight, and at some point, my mind just couldn't take it anymore.

When I returned to myself, I was here, and I've been here ever since, thinking about the nature of that creature that came through my wall as if it was no more a barrier than the door over there.

Jerry leaned away from the man slowly, the oldster still staring at that crack that stretched across the flat plane of his ceiling.

"Have you seen him since?" Jerry asked, not wanting to know but needing to.

Mr. Vognar never looked away from the crack, but Jerry felt sure that he could see him peeking out of her peripherals.

"Sometimes, late at night, I see colors from that crack up there. I know he's watching. I think he enjoys seeing me suffer. And now you know, too. And now it will eat away at you as well."

He started to laugh, a deep and hateful sound, and it took all of Jerry's strength to fumble out of the chair and run from that room. It wasn't just his fun house laughter or the corpse that was creating it. The idea of some creature that could move freely through his world, seeing it as little more than a game board or a picture made of rice and glue, terrified him the farther it wormed into his brain. They called his name at the nurse's station when he passed, but he kept running. He didn't stop running until he was in his car in the parking lot, but that was when it all truly started.

He saw a crack in the windshield, a simple star made by a stray rock.

He had thought he might be done shaking, but it seemed he had a little more in him as he fell out of the car and scrambled through the parking lot, leaving his vehicle open and abandoned in the parking spot.

* * * * *

"I haven't gone back to check on it since. I assume security has either towed it or secured it for me. I spent the last two weeks spackling every crack in my house. I never realized there were so many until I started. Then I looked at the corners, wondering if they could get in there. Who's to say what a door is to them? They could come anywhere and at any time."

"What will you do?" I asked, unsure how to help this man.

It was hard having knowledge that you didn't ask for.

"I don't know, but every day I think about it, I'm pretty sure I'm one step closer to losing my mind. I wonder now if that's what happened to Mr. Vognar. Did he lose his mind after seeing that thing, or because the thought of things coming in drove him crazy?"

He left soon after that, and I never heard from him again.

I did look up Mr. Vognar when I got to work the next day and discovered he had passed the day after Jerry's visit. The report said he had a heart attack, but they also reported strange burns on his chest during the autopsy. It was written off as an allergic reaction or some odd occurrence, but I can't help but wonder if the strange creature he spoke of finally came back to get him?

Cashmere just gets weirder and weirder the longer I look into these things.

I hardly need an otherworldly being to make me feel like I might be losing it the longer I remain in this Bermuda triangle of strangeness. 

---

Credits

Tales from Cashmere Hospital: Trapped in the Elevator

It was only a matter of time before I had my own experience.

You only get to chronicle things like this for so long before they decide to come and say hi.

Yesterday they rolled out the welcome wagon in spectacular fashion.

It all started with the laziness of the shift before me. I came in around six pm to start my shift and noticed a large white legal envelope at the reception desk. I asked Tyler, the guy who works the day shift, how long that had been sitting there? He shrugged and said they had brought it around noon. When I asked why he hadn't bothered to get it delivered, he said he had been busy. Given the indent in the chair, I doubted he had left the desk all day.

He said his goodbyes and headed home, and I sat down to start my own work for the night.

I promptly forgot about the envelope until midnight when I got the phone call that started all this.

The second I heard the oh-so-dosser tonnes of head nurse Finley from five east, I knew this wouldn't be a fun conversation.

"Do you have a legal envelope at your desk?"

"Yeah, dayshift left it up here and never delivered it."

"So when were you planning to deliver it?"

I could almost hear her biting the inside of her cheek as she talked to me.

"My apologies, ma'am. I am still waiting to receive a break. When someone comes to relieve me for a few minutes, I bring it up there to you.

"Those papers are critical, and I needed them at the start of my shift, not six hours later. Have someone bring them to me immediately, or I'll be drafting a complaint to your supervisor."

That got my attention. My supervisor, Helen, pretty well left the night shift alone. Dayshift, however, was almost constantly subjected to her micromanaging. If I gave her a reason to, I'm sure she'd be more than happy to add me to her list of things to do. I turned on my best Customer Service voice and assured the charge nurse that I would have her envelope there within the hour.

She hung up on me, and I looked up to see Carl wandering by about that time.

"Hey, Carl, do you have a minute to take this up to five East?"

"Sorry, man," Carl said, "I'm on a tight schedule tonight. I need to get up to three north before three o'clock to handle some kind of lock malfunction for them."

"Okay, well, could you stand here for five minutes while I do it? I'll be right up and down. It won't take me more than a couple of minutes."

That got Carl's attention. You could tell the poor guy had been running his legs off all night. Hospital security never seemed to stop after eight o'clock, and the thought of taking it easy for five to ten minutes appealed to him. He nodded, telling me to go ahead as he took a load off, and I grabbed the envelope and headed for the elevator.

The elevators in the lobby are brand new. They don't hitch, they don't shake, and they can generally be counted on to take you from the ground floor to the fifth floor without smelling like burning rubber bands, or threatening to drop you to your death. They were installed about five years ago with some budget money from the state, and they're a vast improvement over the ones they had before that, or so I've been told. They're well-maintained, too. All the lights work, the handrails are clean, and when you push the buttons, they light up, letting you know exactly where they will take you.

I walked past these and turned down a nearby corridor to find the staff elevators.

If you've never worked in a hospital, you might not be aware of this. The administration doesn't like it when staff use the guest elevators. It leads guests to ask them questions, questions that some of them are more than happy to answer whether they should or not. It also leads staff to push patients in Gurnee onto elevators, which sometimes frightens guests. This is, of course, gone over very carefully in our yearly training, so we all know not to use the nice new guest elevators.

The staff elevators are not as nice. The lights flicker, they smell like they're constantly about to break, and they are notorious for getting stuck between floors. According to maintenance, they hadn’t sized the elevator shaft right when they built the fourth and fifth floors. This leads to some problems sometimes, and Mark says that not a week goes by when he doesn't get at least one call to the switchboard about someone being stuck in the elevators. In fact, he had a hilarious story about a doctor who cried on the emergency phone for close to three hours while he was stuck inside one of those elevators. He said the poor guy was talking about things with claws, disembodied laughing, and weird noises coming from outside the elevator. Mark always laughed it off as weird, frightening paranoia, and until today, I had laughed right along with him.

The trip up in the elevators was uneventful. The wheels chugged, and the lights flickered a little when they passed between floor 3 and floor 4, but when they dinged drunkenly to let me out onto the fifth floor, only a minute and a half had passed. I walked around the corner to five north, and it seemed that luck was with me. The charge nurse was just stepping into the back to get a cup of coffee, and I handed the envelope to one of her subordinates as I asked if she would mind passing it off to her? She smiled and said she would, advising that I get moving before the old battle ax returned and found me here.

I climbed happily back into the staff elevator, thinking I had dodged a bullet. When I hit the big red one on the elevator, I thought nothing more exciting than a ride down was in my future, but I had no idea what was in store for me. When the elevator ground to a halt between floors three and four, I loosed a growling cry of rage. In frustration, I smashed at the buttons, but the box did little but click and grind as it stuck tight in the shaft.

I was going to have to call Mark so David could get me unstuck.

I picked up the emergency phone inside the little box at the bottom of the button pad and expected to hear it click as it rang in the control room. Instead, it just hung there silently in my hand. I hung it back up and picked it up again, expecting a delay in the line, but there was still silence. I figured I had disconnected the line when my elevator got stuck, and when I hung the phone up, I thought guiltily about how Carl would be a little late for his checks.

Without the ability to let anyone know, I could be stuck here for quite some time.

I paced around the elevator like a mouse stuck in a shoebox. I hated confined places. I wasn't claustrophobic, but I hated the feeling of being stuck. The little box felt like a coffin the longer I sat in it, and looking at my watch, didn't help matters. At some point, it had stopped, and I hadn't noticed. It informed me that only about four minutes had passed since I left my desk. That couldn't be right. I had been stuck in this elevator longer than that. I tried the phone again, but it was still dead, and I hung it up a little harder than I strictly needed to.

As I sat in the corner of the elevator, feeling the cold metal against my back, it sounded like something was tapping against the outside.

Well, of course, I could hear tapping, I told myself. The elevator was sitting in a shaft, probably trying to get itself to work again. If nothing else, it was ticking as it got comfortable in the slightly too-small chute. It sounded different than that. This sounded different than the ticking of an elevator getting comfortable and more like the tapping of fingers on glass. I tried to put it out of my mind, telling myself I was being silly, but as I leaned my head against the metal box, the tapping became harder and harder to ignore.

It was almost rhythmic. Two beats, then three beats, and two beats again on the outside of the metal box. It reminded me of someone just absent-mindedly tapping on their desk, maybe working out a beat in their head as they put words to it. It had no real rhythm, and the longer I listened to it, the less sure I was that it was normal elevator noise. Was somebody out there? They couldn't be, could they? That was why the elevators got stuck, after all. The space was too small.

I had been thinking too loudly about it and missed the point when the tapping had stopped.

I sat in a pregnant silence for a count of thirty, cocking my head as I listened and waited for the tapping to begin again.

When the elevator suddenly shook like it had been kicked by a horse, I felt like I might need new pants when this was all over.

I tried to get a hold of myself. It was just maintenance working on the elevator, after all. Someone had noticed that the elevator wasn't working, and they were trying to get it running again. I was sure David was in the motor room, trying to figure out how much pressure to put on the winch to get the cart to move without ripping it to shreds. He told me one night that it was basically all he could do. Just exert a little more force on the winch, and hope that he didn't pulp some poor staffer.

"OSHA would likely have a field day with it, but I'm just doing what management told me to do." He had said.

When it lurched again, I breathed a sigh of relief as it started to go down the shaft.

I grabbed the rails, however, as the feeling of gravity left the car. I was suddenly plummeting down like a comet. The buttons flashed, dinging a hellish chorus as I shook and clung to the walls. As I fell, I watched the numbers tick down until they were finally just spinning in place, indecipherable jargon that meant nothing.

When the screeching returned, I no longer had any illusions that it was just the box grinding against the walls.

The doors began to rock, and the lights overhead flashed like a funhouse ride. Something began to peel the doors open, its long black claws making the steel slabs groan in agony. As it slid open, I could see something huge push its head into the space. It had a face like a dragon, its eyes burning as it stared at me through the gap. Behind it, I could see that I was falling through a red and black hellscape. The skies cried fire as the ground came up to swallow me, but I didn't think smashing into the earth was the worst outcome in this case.

As it opened its mouth, I saw a fire kindling in its throat. The bloom of red began to grow, and I could feel the heat of it as it built in the small space. I covered my face with my arms, praying for any protection my frail body could grant me.

Then the cheery ding filled the car, and I was looking at the dim illumination from the staff hallway by night. A woman was stepping in, a cup of coffee in one hand and a phone in the other, and she stopped as she saw me. She looked confused, asking if I was okay, but as the doors began to close, I shot through them like a lunatic and went running from the elevator like the devil himself was chasing me.

Carl smiled and commented that I had only been gone about five minutes and must have made good time.

His face fell when he got a good look at me, and he turned white as I told him what had happened.

"Maybe David really did see something in the stairwell," he whispered, and all I could do was nod somberly.

I sat there for the rest of my shift, but I didn't get any work done.

I haven't slept well in three days, my nightmares plagued by the images I saw in that elevator.

I have stumbled onto the hospital's radar, and as little as I want to find out what it has in store for me, I will be back tomorrow night for more.

The money is nice, but what I really crave is the tales that come from the lips of the recently terrified.

Huh, there may be a book somewhere in these stories.

My suffering and their suffering should be worth something, after all. 

---

Credits

Tales from Cashmere Hospital: When The Lights Went Out

The doctor, one of the newer plastic surgeons at Cashmere Hospital, looked a little sheepish as he approached my desk. I had only seen him a few times, and he had never spoken to me directly. He was a vain fellow in the same vein as a few of the other hotshot docks around the ER, but today, he looked rattled. His hair was unkempt, his clothing looked dirty, and he was glancing around in that way that made me think he might be being followed.

“Are you the one who collects the stories?” he asked.

I looked around, not sure if he was hiding from someone, before telling him that I was.

“Carl said you would understand. I don’t know what happened to me, but he told me that you might be able to help me make sense of it. I know you’re at work, but do you have a minute to talk?”

It was currently about ten o’clock and I was in the middle of a lull in activity. The real work wouldn’t be possible until after they called for visitors to leave, so I pushed out a chair and pulled out a notepad. I had started carrying it religiously, the stories becoming habitual, and I wanted to get all the information while it was fresh.

His name was Doctor Gary Long, and he had experienced something I had only heard about once before.

The more he talked, the more I realized he was talking about the creatures that had taken up residents in the forbidden corridor over in the East Wing Record Messineen.

* * * * *

I've only been working at Cashmere Hospital for a couple of months, but I had heard all the rumors. Doctor Logan still tells people about what happened to him in the elevator, people talk about the ghost girl in the South Wing that jumps from the fifth-story balcony, and everyone, nurses and doctors alike, knows that if you stay in the OR too late, you might run into Shaky Leg Mary. I listened, but I privately thought they were nothing but stories. It was just talk, every hospital has them, but Cashmere Hospital has a bit of a reputation. Even in Med School, the students knew about the weirdness that surrounds the hospital, and when my friends heard I had accepted an offer to work there, they joked that I was gonna get taken away by some ghost one night.

Well, I don’t think it was a ghost that tried to get me.

Ghosts don’t do what this thing did.

It was late when I got done with my case. I had dressed out and was leaving to get my car from the garage. This may sound silly, but I always park my car at the bottom of the car park. It's a two thousand twenty-one Mercedes that I’m still likely to be paying off when I’m forty, but doctors are expected to maintain a certain air of affluents. Fancy watches, big houses, shiny cars, it all gives off the illusion of wealth while most of us are drowning in student loans and credit card debt. The car was a frivolity that I couldn’t really afford, but I was trying and mostly succeeding at keeping my head above water.

So when I took the elevator down to the fifth-floor basement of the car park and found nothing but empty spots, I was shocked.

I had parked it in the third spot on the left side and now it was gone.

There were no other cars down there, either, so I could only assume that someone had either stolen it or it had been towed for some reason.

I was grumbling when I climbed back into the elevator, but I felt confident that this could be solved in short order. If it had been stolen, then my insurance would get me a rental car until the police found it. The car was insured, insured for quite a lot, and I had little doubt that the premiums would buy me another one if it had been taken. If the hospital had my car towed, then THEY would get me a rental car or get the impound lot to bring my damn car back.

When the elevator didn’t move after I jabbed the button, my anger flared. I slapped at the buttons, but nothing happened. I picked up the phone and tried to call the switchboard, but there was no tone. The doors didn’t close either, which didn’t seem weird until I thought about it. They just stayed open, and I finally threw the phone at the bank of lit-up buttons and decided to walk out of the garage and find someone to yell at. It had been a long day, I was tired, and all this bullcrap was really starting to make me mad.

I started walking towards the ramp then, and if I’d known what would happen later, I think I’d have just stayed in the elevator.

The next floor up was empty too, and I wondered how later it was before my watch told me it was barely nine. Most of the other employees were probably just lazy and didn’t want to drive all the way back up. They didn’t care if people dinged their cars, and I figured I would see more cars as I went up. It was comfortable enough down there, the concrete box creating a cave of sorts, and the fluorescents overhead hummed with insectile good cheer. Other than the hum, my footfalls seemed to be the only noise. The constant tock tock tock of my sneakers was monotonous but it was also a little nice to know I hadn’t just gone deaf. There really wasn’t any other sound down there, and as I came to the third floor, I was surprised that there still wasn’t a window to the outside.

The first two levels I had come through were basements, but surely this one should be on ground level, right?

This floor was when I started to notice the plants, as well. They were palmettos, I think, and they sprouted up from the concrete in places. The fronds looked pokey and I really didn’t want to touch them and find out. I wondered why maintenance or groundskeeping hadn’t done something about them, but it was really none of my business. They were in the corners or out of the way, and they weren’t hurting anything. The Georgia flora had always been a bit invasive sometimes, and seeing plants in a manmade structure wasn’t anything uncommon.

That was the first time I felt something watching me too.

The first time I heard something other than the lights humming or the scuff of my shoes.

I was coming up the ramp and onto the second floor, when I heard something scrub against the concrete. It was a low sound, like fingernails, but when I turned, there was nothing there. The concrete parking structure was still empty and it was becoming odd that I hadn’t seen any cars or people. A dozen others, nurses and techs, had been in the surgery with me, and to have seen absolutely none of their vehicles was strange. I was coming to the levels just beneath the entrance ramp. Why hadn’t I seen anyone yet?

As the phantom eyes bore a hole between my shoulder blades, I picked up the pace.

I wanted to be out of here, and my anger was beginning to subside as the creeping chill of fear sent icy fingers through it.

The next floor should have definitely been at ground level, but it was the same bland box that the others had been. There were no cars, no people, but the plants had gotten thicker. They were looking more like jungle plants now, and the cool cave was becoming a little humid. I saw vines hanging from the ceiling, and they seemed to be coming right out of the concrete. Why hadn’t I ever noticed any of this before? Its presence did little to soothe me, and when I heard a crunch from behind me, I quickened my pace again.

I could still hear that low noise behind me. I wasn’t as alone as I thought. It felt like something was stalking me, and as I ran up the next ramp, I almost cried out when it was more of the same. The plants were getting thicker, and the concrete seemed to be giving way to dirt in places. I was running now, my feet carrying me onward as my brain began to scream at me that we were trapped. I stumbled, but I caught myself before I fell, and glanced back to make sure nothing was chasing me.

I don’t know how, but I knew that if I fell, that would be the end of me.

I had gone higher than the parking deck could possibly be, five floors higher than the roof when the lights suddenly went out.

I don't mean the lights flickered, I don’t mean they just sort of dimmed, I mean that suddenly, I was something akin to blind.

As I stood still in the blackness, I could hear them again.

They sounded like animals, walking around on all fours as their claws scrape across the ground. I had thought there was only one, but the longer I listened, the more I thought it might be two, or three, or as many as six. They were searching for me, stalking me through the murk, and I didn’t dare move. Something in the instinctual part of my brain told me that, if I moved, they would know where I was. It told me to stand as still as I could and not to make a sound as they hunted for me. They searched, they sniffed, but eventually, I heard them moving away, and that was when I made my escape.

I ran like my life depended on it, and maybe it did.

They heard me sooner than I would have thought, and I tore off in the general direction of the next ramp. The layout of the parking structure was pretty uniform, and I knew that if I just kept moving in a circle, I could get to the next floor. Something in me screamed that if I could get out of here, that if I could get free of whatever loop I was in, I could lose these creatures and be done with this madness.

Their claws sounded huge as they ate up the ground. They made little huffing noises as they ran, and I couldn’t imagine what they must look like. I think I settled on a pack of panthers that had come to get me, and when I suddenly ran into a concrete wall, I just knew they were about to rip me to shreds. It turned out to be for the best, however. As I lay there, trying to see if my nose was broken, something hit the wall I had run into with a loud and angry yowl. It hit it hard enough to send concrete chips cascading over me, and I put a hand over my mouth as I lay completely silent on the dusty concrete.

It picked itself up and shook off whatever damage the wall had done to it before snuffling the air soupily. It was looking for me, and I did not want to be found. I could feel its bulk as it came close, smell the rancid meat that must lay beneath those claws, and I hoped that it couldn’t hear me trembling. I expected that every breath would be my last, and the thought that I would die as I took shallow, half-breaths was depressing.

Some indeterminable amount of time later, the creature moved away, and I got up as quietly as I could and tiptoed for the wall. I had misjudged the circle I was making, and when I found the edge, I headed up the ramp and kept climbing. Something was different now, I could feel it, and when my light-deprived eyes began to adjust to the intrusion of light, I knew I was getting close to the surface. As my hope came back, I started running again, and that's when I heard them behind me. I came up and I saw the crossbar and little booth that told me the front of the parking deck was in sight.

I put on a burst of speed, and when I ducked under the arm, I heard somethings claws rake across the wood.

I fell onto the asphalt and looked back in time to see a sold black creature with a head like a spade. Its body looked like it was covered in scales instead of fur, and teeth that hung from that mouth looked painful large. It had no eyes, but it pointed its spade-shaped head in my direction and seemed to know where I was. Despite the small burn of the moon and the distant islands of the security lights, the creature was still unwilling to come out and get me.

It slunk back into the parking structure, and I sighed in relief.

I screamed in surprise when I heard footsteps coming towards me, but it was just Carl.

He had been smoking by the parking deck, and when he heard me running out, he came to investigate. I told him about the creatures, and he only shrugged like this was just one more thing on his plate. He offered to go get my car for me, and when I asked him if he wasn’t afraid of the things down there, he said it was nothing new. “Stuff like that happens all the time,” he said and told me to go wait for him in the front lobby.

“There's a guy there who I think will want to talk to you. I have a feeling he knows just what you're talking about.”

* * * * * *

The Mercedes in question came rolling up about that point and Doctor Long seemed relieved.

I finished my notes, but I could feel him staring in much the way he had described the creatures staring at him.

“So, have you ever heard of anything like that before?”

“Yeah, it's not the first time. If it happens again, just stay in the elevator until it stops. The hospital is like a strange kind of waiting room all its own. Sometimes you slip into places that you aren’t prepared for, and it's best to just wait until reality reasserts itself.”

“I don’t think I’ll be parking in that structure again. I’ll take my chances in staff parking. A few dings on the door is a small price to pay for peace of mind.”

He thanked me before leaving, and I transcribed his notes into the pdf I was keeping for the weird things that happen around here.

Eventually, we all slip into that strange other room just beyond the waiting room, and if you're lucky, you get to slip back out again too.

Doctor Long was lucky, but he may not get so lucky a second time. 

---

Credits

Tales from Cashmere Hospital: Hack it All Up

 

“What brings you to the ER today?” I asked boredly

"I need a check-up. I recently got over an illness, and I really just need someone to have a look at me."

The guy on the bed looked healthier than anyone I had seen today. He lacked the phlegmy sound that most of the others had shown, the cough so full of rails, and the fever that spiked into the low end of one hundred one, and that was a little weird. After checking in fourteen others with similar symptoms in just the hour since I'd gotten back from lunch, I could have easily rattled off their symptoms myself, but this guy had none of the usual hallmarks. Cashmere was in the grip of a flu epidemic, and they had enticed me in with the promise of overtime if I would come help with intake in the ER. I had splurged a little more than I had strictly meant to on the Christmas Steam Sale, and with my pockets a little lighter in the new year, I had no choice but to put in some OT if I wanted my rent to get paid this month.

"Well, I've got to have something to put down on the page if you want the doc to take you seriously. What brings you into the ER today?"

He looked unsure, like someone who doesn't know where to begin, "I was sick, but then something happened last night, something I'm really not sure how to describe."

I raised an eyebrow at him, intrigued as I took a seat, "Start from the beginning then. I'll figure it out as we go along."

Kenny was sick, sicker than he had been in a long time.

His throat hurt, his head spun from the fever, and the coughing made him feel like his chest might cave in. It felt like the flu, and Kenny was afraid that he might have finally caught the Covid he had tried so hard to avoid since the start of the pandemic. Unlike his friends, Kenny had gotten vaccinated, gotten his boosters, and taken any new supplement he could get to steel his immune system against whatever might come. He'd watched his dad suffer through it in the ICU for almost two months, his life hanging in the balance every second of the day. When he'd finally come out the other side, he'd still been weak as a kitten for months after. He was only now back to something like normalcy, and his sickness had made Kenny downright scared of the virus.

For the last two years, he'd had so much vitamin C and Immune booster rolling around in his system that he hadn’t even picked up a cold, and when he'd started coughing, he knew that something had finally caught up with him.

When his Covid test had come back negative, he'd breathed a thick sigh of relief.

After what he'd been through, he almost wished it had been positive.

At least then Kenny would have something to attribute all the weirdness to.

It started with drainage. Kenny had never been the kind of person to carry a handkerchief, but now he seemed to go through three a day. The poor rags would be sodden by the end of the day, thick with mucus from his constantly running nose. The running nose and constant throat drip had seemed to come before the other symptoms, and Kenny found that he was always honking his nose or coughing up phlegm. The flow was endless, and his chest soon hurt from all the coughing and hacking.

He had called work to let them know what was going on, and his foreman was more than happy to let him stay home.

"I've been trying to get you to use those vacation days for months. Sounds like a perfect opportunity to take your two-week vacation."

"Some vacation," Kenny spat, coughing up a big glob of mucus into the trash can.

"Take your days and enjoy getting paid for being sick." his boss shot back, telling him he'd see him in twelve days before hanging up.

Kenny grumbled as he hung up, not thinking he would need two weeks, but by the next day, he was thankful for the time.

He'd woken up to find his skin on fire. Kenny was burning up, his thermometer saying he had a fever of 101.2. His head pounded, his throat felt scratchy, and his nose and throat gushing snot. He blew it out, hacked it up, and constantly felt it trickling down his throat. He spent most of that second day in bed, reeling with the fever and feeling like he didn't have the strength to do much but turn his head and watch a little TV. His one foray into the kitchen had been to grab a few water bottles, a bag of chips, and a few granola bars. One of the water bottles was now a soupy, half full mix of hacked-up phlegm and spit, and Kenny had been watching Friends through owlish eyes as he slipped in and out of consciousness. He was absolutely miserable and knew he needed cold medicine if he wanted to get past this.

He was trying to get up, his arms shaking as he tried to rise, and the next thing he knew, he was lying in a puddle of drool and snot as the sun shone and his stomach gurgled.

That was how the vomiting started.

The granola bars and chips were joined in the bowl by an alarming amount of green goo. His sinuses had been constantly draining since this all started, and every upheaval brought more of it out of his stomach. He had moved to the bathroom then, the vomiting and nausea only adding to his weakness, and Kenny was soon lying on the floor with a towel under his head. That was the first time he thought he might die as he lay shuddering and coughing next to his toilet. His body ached, and not only from the fever. He was sore from all the throwing up and coughing, and when he tried to get his legs under him so he could get some more water, they shook too much to hold him. He had to drag himself to the tub and drink some water from the spout before passing out again on the cold tiles.

He woke up covered in something and worried he had thrown up on himself in his sleep.

He was relieved, realizing that he could have choked to death on his sick, but as his hands slid over his arms, he realized it wasn't puke.

As his hand came away slimy, he lifted a hand to his face to see a thin coating and realized it was also covering the floor.

It was snot.

His own mucus had dribbled from his nose and puddled on the ground around him. He swiped the same hand over his face and came away with a translucent trail of spidery fluid. Kenny was transfixed by it, watching the light play off the muck as the vanity lights hit it, but as he watched, he saw little else to do but drag himself into the bathtub. It took all of his limited energy to pull himself up over the lip, and he more or less fell into the basin. Kenny lay on his back, gasping for air, as he stared at the popcorn ceiling and felt the mucus slide out of his nose. It wet his shoulders, soaking his back as it pooled, and Kenny could do little but lay there, panting like a dog.

He spent the day sipping water from the tap, his body still racked with coughing and fever. The plastic wasn't as cold as the tile, soaking up some heat Kenny had managed to turn on before his body had gone into rebellion. He could still feel the snot as it dribbled around him, his shoulder feeling sticky. He hacked up more of it, letting it fall to the side as it mingled with the rest.

As the day waned, Kenny felt his stomach rumble and curled into a ball as he felt his gorge rising again. Tears began sliding out of his eyes, his pathetic state becoming too much to handle. As he swiped at his eyes, the tears came away in long ropes. The tears were viscous, sticking to his hands, and when he shook them, they also proved to be mucus. Kenny snapped his eyes shut, the tears still flowing as his nose ran like a faucet. He shuddered himself to sleep at some point, praying to anyone who might be listening to just make it all go away.

When he opened his eyes next, Kenny thought he might have accidentally turned on the water.

He was semi-submerged in a warm, thick liquid, and upon realizing this, Kenny surfaced as he sucked in a breath. His face was slimy, and his eyes crusted shut as the thick sludge coursed from them. Not just his eyes, though. His ears, his nose, and even the corners of his mouth seemed to run continuously. The liquid was nearly up to his waist now that he was sitting up, and as he scrubbed his eyes open, he could see that his pours also flowed with the stuff. He was like a toad, his skin slick and oozing, and when his stomach heaved, he doubted anything he'd eaten would come up.

As the wave of thick green mucus rocketed up his throat, he realized he'd been right. His upheaval filled the tub more, the thick snot coating his throat as it hit the plastic tub like sleet. He was powerless to stop it, and when he fell, he turned his head so he wouldn't break his nose. He continued to vomit, but it was more like what you hack into a napkin. His throat should have been raw after all that, but it only felt sticky amidst so much mucus.

Kenny wheezed, his coughs thick and watery, and he felt like he was drowning. He'd read about dry drowning once when you breathe in water, and it saturates your lungs as it drowns you slowly, and that was how this felt. His breathing was soupy, but he still managed to pull in the oxygen he needed as the goop poured out of him. The mucus flowed from every pore, and as it did, he felt his eyes getting heavy. He didn't want to sleep. He knew that if he couldn't keep his head up, he'd drown in this stuff, but he was powerless to stop himself.

He was out of energy, and as Kenny slipped off, he wasn't sure he would ever wake up again.

He came to sometime in the middle of the night, the tub empty and his lungs and chest clearer than they had been in days.

The mucus pool was gone, but whether it had gone down the drain or simply left on its own, Kenny would never know.

He had a vague sort of memory, almost a dream, of floating weightlessly in a pool of green. It churned around him like a great ocean, moving him as he lay there. He was weightless, rising and falling at its leisure, and as he drifted within it, he felt as the caterpillar must while it hung within its cocoon.

Wherever it had gone, it had also taken his fever and weakness with it. As Kenny sat up, he felt like a new man. As his stomach growled, he got up to make food, steadying himself as he nearly slipped on the remains of his sickness. If it hadn't been for the thin coating of slime in the bottom of the tub, Kenny might have wondered if he'd even been sick at all. That shiny layer of mucus, however, reminded him of the miserable night he'd spent as it poured from every orifice.

He made a mental note to go to the hospital the next day, and after a shower and a good meal, he slept sounder than he had in days.

* * * * *

"And that was yesterday when you woke up in the tub?" I asked, not quite believing what I was hearing.

The man nodded, "It was the strangest thing. I feel better than I have in months, and I haven't even had any of my usual allergy symptoms for this time of year. I normally keep a runny nose after October, but I haven't had to sniffle or blow it all day. It's like I pushed every ounce of mucus out of my body, and now I'm free of it."

I finished filling out the form, telling him the doctor would be in to see him soon.

Looking over it now, I can't help but shake my head. I had thought maybe it was just the hospital that was odd, but the more stories like this I collected, the more I think it might be the whole town. Cashmere is an epicenter for strangeness, and the longer I work here, the more I believe it's starting to get worse. 

---

Credits