The Frighteners (25 page)

Eighteen

I
vy weeds were about the only living things in the Fairwater Tuberculosis Sanatorium. Ivy grew everywhere, up the graffiti-covered walls and over the smashed-in or boarded-up windows. Between the buildings, old gardens once lush with carefully tended shrubs and flowers had gone wild with weeds, broken glass, and beer cans left behind following the beer parties of Fairwater’s more daring high-school students.

Frank and Lucy ran across the courtyard toward the East Wing. Moonlight filtered in through rotting curtains as Frank broke into a large ward, full of skeletal bed frames and moldy mattresses. The stench of mold and pigeon dung fouled the air as Frank and Lucy dashed down the center aisle, through an adjoining corridor, and into another equally large, rotten ward.

The rows of beds seemed to go on forever.

“This is barbaric,” Lucy said. “I can’t believe medicine was practiced like this only a hundred years ago.”

“How do you cure tuberculosis?” Frank asked.

“Antibiotics, but they didn’t have them long ago. Mostly they locked you away with a bunch of others like you.”

“Kind of like a cemetery,” Frank said.

“What?”

“There’s no cure for death either, so they lock you away with the rest.”

“You came back,” she said, “And thank God, too.” She hugged him, then reached up and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

They heard the squeak of rubber-soled shoes on the old linoleum. Someone was stalking them, but who? Frank pulled Lucy down behind a rusty old bed, and then slid beneath it with her. They huddled together, their bodies touching from head to toe, and tried to breathe as quietly as possible.

The footsteps came down the hall and into the ward. In the moonlight filtering in through the broken windows, they made out Patricia’s feet, visible under the rows of old beds. She walked right past them, and for a fleeting moment Frank could see the barrel of his old rifle. She was scanning the room, looking for them. But she walked right past and into the next ward.

Frank and Lucy breathed a sigh of relief. Sucking in the musty old air, with the smells of old medicine all about, was hallucinogenic; lying beneath the bed, it was easy to imagine what the hospital must have been like in 1954, when Johnny Bradley worked there as a young orderly.

Suddenly there was the sound of loud coughing directly above them. Frank looked up as a decrepit old man, suffering from the ravages of the disease once called consumption, leaned over the edge of his bed and snarled at Lucy and him.

“Orderly!” he called out.

Frank and Lucy scrambled out from under the bed, confused by this vision, or hallucination, or whatever.

“Orderly! I called for an orderly!” the old man said again.

“Please be quiet,” Lucy said, but he couldn’t seem to hear her.

The ward was suddenly bright, lit with hospital mercury-vapor lamps. All the beds were full, with coughing, emaciated patients, all in regulation hospital robes.

“There’s strangers under my bed!” the old man yelled again. “I say, orderly!”

“Frank, where are we?” Lucy whispered in Bannister’s ear.

“Nineteen fifty-four, I think.”

“How can that happen?”

“Like I told you, when you’ve been through a trauma—”

“Sometimes it alters your perception, so you can see things normal people can’t.”

“In this case, we’re looking at the collective spirit of this hospital when it still had patients in it.”

“Why do you say we’re in 1954?” Lucy asked.

“Look.” He nodded in the direction of a rattling trolley. Lucy turned to see a neat, young orderly wheel a tea trolley into the ward. He was dressed in an immaculately pressed white hospital uniform and his hair was slicked back, as was the fashion in the early 1950s. Johnny Bradley grinned at Frank and Lucy.

Frank grabbed Lucy and pushed her through a door into the corridor. It was a busy hospital corridor such as might have existed in 1954, all the equipment now looking slightly old-fashioned. The doctors, nurses, and visitors bustling along that hall also wore hair and clothing styles at least forty years out of date. The walls, while clean, were painted dull gray, not the pastel colors found in most hospital corridors today.

Frank and Lucy pushed desperately through the thick crowd, trying to get away from Johnny. Knocked aside by Frank’s elbow, one fedora-wearing man snapped, “Hey, watch it, buddy.”

“Sorry,” Frank said, but continued pulling Lucy past several other people.

They heard a nurse say brightly, “Look, everyone! It’s young Miss Patty!”

Frank and Lucy stopped in their tracks. The crowd ahead of them shrank back against the walls, revealing a young and pretty fifteen-year-old Patty Bartlett bounding happily down the corridor.

“What’s happening, Frank?” Lucy whispered.

“We’re seeing Patty and Johnny as they were when they met—when the killing started.”

“She doesn’t look like a mad killer,” Lucy said.

“Hang on,” Frank whispered back as the lights suddenly dimmed and the crowd disappeared and the bright and happy hospital became the old and abandoned one. And the young and pretty Patty turned abruptly into the mad and homicidal old Patricia. She spotted them and right away raised the rifle and opened fire.

“Frank,” Lucy said.

Bullets zipped by Frank, who was frozen in place, overwhelmed by the shifting images and unable to move. Then Patricia’s trigger fell several times on an empty chamber. As she swore and began to reload, Lucy shoved Frank through a door that led to a stairwell.

“This way,” she said.

“How do you know?” he asked, shaking off the cobwebs that had momentarily frozen him in the hallway.

“I don’t. I’m guessing.”

With Lucy leading, they ran down and down a dark, spiraling stairwell, farther and farther into the old hospital basement. At the bottom level, a rusting door opened up into a nearly black hallway laden with abandoned equipment. Musty bedding was stacked against the walls, which were thick with mold and algae that grew on the water leaching from old lead pipes.

“This must be the servants’ entrance to hell,” Frank said.

“Hospital basements are all depressing,” Lucy said. “That’s why they always put the cafeteria there.”

“How does that work out?”

“Don’t you want to eat when you’re depressed?”

He nodded, and then hushed her as they heard the sound of young Patty’s voice. It was coming from a distance down the hall, through twin metal doors marked
MORTUARY.

“Oooh! Please . . . don’t hurt me,” Patty’s voice said.

The cries echoed down the corridor, Frank and Lucy looked around to make sure no one was looking, but there was no one there. Cautiously, they pushed open the mortuary doors and peeked inside. Then they heard the sound of heavy footsteps behind them, coming down the same stairs they had taken.

“Quick, inside and close the doors,” Frank said.

There was the sound of heavy breathing; two sets of it, a man’s and a woman’s.

Young Patty’s voice said, “No . . . don’t . . . Stop! Please!”

Frank and Lucy looked around and found themselves in the dimly lit hospital morgue of 1954. Fresh bodies lay on stainless-steel trolleys. Toe tags dangled from cold and blue big toes. “We go to the best places,” she said. “Cemeteries . . . morgues.”

“Come on, you could package this tour and sell it to New Yorkers for a thousand each.”

He led her through the sea of trollies.

Suddenly they heard young Patty cry out, “Oooh, Johnny . . .”

Frank and Lucy pushed open the door marked
AUTOPSY ROOM.

Johnny and young Patty were making love on the autopsy table. Frank and Lucy stared at each other speechlessly. Then they heard the sound of a rifle bolt being pulled back. They spun around and found themselves facing the grown Patricia. The gun in her hands swung toward Frank.

“That’s my rifle,” he said quietly.

“I know,” Patricia replied.

She fired once. Frank took a bullet in the shoulder and fell backward as Lucy screamed and reached for him. He fell backward literally and temporally—into 1954, tumbling against a trolley and knocking a corpse onto the floor. He landed on his back as the corpse fell toward him.

As he hit the cold, stone floor of that ancient morgue, Frank’s memory came back to him. He remembered Debra’s body hitting the forest floor. He remembered his own face, bloodied from the car accident, lying on top of pine needles. Barely conscious, he looked up and saw Patty—the young, innocent Patty whom everybody in the hospital seemed to love so much—standing among the trees, holding his rifle. Frank watched helplessly as she stooped over Debra’s body, holding a scalpel, and carved the number thirteen into her forehead.

Frank squeezed his eyes shut, unable to move, as Patty calmly walked toward him. The background behind her swam and altered: first forest, then morgue, then forest, and morgue again. The young Patty held the muzzle of the gun against Frank’s forehead in the forest and pulled the trigger. Frank squeezed his eyes shut, but the trigger fell on an empty cylinder again.

Bannister opened his eyes again. He was in the morgue this time, and the older Patricia swore at her lack of ammunition and brought the butt of the gun down on his head, knocking him unconscious. Lucy screamed, “Get away from him, you maniac,” and tried to grab at Patricia. But Johnny slid out of the wall and grabbed her from behind.

“Finish him off,” he said.

“You can’t do that,” Lucy said. “He’s a good man who’s never done anything to you.”

“He’s been a thorn in our sides too long,” Johnny said. “Finish him off and then we can get to this nosy bitch.”

Lucy struggled, but Johnny was far too strong for her.

Patricia tossed aside the rifle and grabbed a piece of cord off a table. She wound it around Frank’s neck. With ruthless precision, she twisted it tighter and tighter. The unconscious Frank could do nothing to stop her, and Lucy was caught fast in Johnny’s grasp. She was forced to watch as Frank was strangled to death.

Frank’s body was blue and as dead as it was possible to be. Stunned, in shock, Lucy fell limp in Johnny’s arms. Patricia stood back, smiling proudly and admiring her handiwork.

“That was beautiful,” Johnny said, laughing. “You turn me on, baby.”

Patricia said. “Yeah, I do? Well, see how this grabs you.” She crossed to a bench and examined rusty old autopsy instruments. “I’m in the mood for a little vivisection,” she said slowly.

Patricia held up a wicked-looking trepan saw, an obsolete form of the trephene, a circular saw once used to remove plugs of bone from the skull. She also displayed a pair of heavy-duty surgical scissors.

“Which would you prefer, Dr. Lynskey?” Patricia asked. “After all, you’re the doctor. It’s only fair that you choose.”

Lucy sobbed and couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. Johnny tightened his grip on her.

“I like the one with the big teeth.” He sneered.

Patricia threw away the scissors. Holding the saw aloft, she walked slowly toward Lucy.

“Let’s see if we can take the top of your skull off while you’re still conscious,” she said.

Lucy screamed.

“Sure we can, baby,” Johnny said. “After all, Dahmer drilled holes into the heads of his victims while they were alive. If he can do it with a power drill, we can do it with that thing.”

Lucy screamed again, but it wasn’t Patricia she was looking at. Beyond Patricia, Lucy watched as Frank’s spirit rose out of his corpse, looked around, and stretched his ghostly muscles.

Patricia bent over Lucy, whom Johnny had locked in his arms. Patricia raised the saw; Johnny pulled back hard on Lucy’s hair, exposing her forehead. Patricia was about to plunge down with the saw when Frank’s spirit grabbed her from behind.

White light flooded the room. An endless corridor of light appeared above Frank’s body. Patricia struggled as Frank rammed his ghostly hand into the back of her neck, pulling and wrenching.

Now it was her turn to scream.

Johnny held Lucy extra tight, but seeing what was going on, screamed at Frank, “Stop it!”

With a mighty tug, Frank ripped Patricia’s soul out of her living body and held it aloft, crushing it between his fingers, much as the Reaper had done to Stuart. The soul splintered into a dying bouquet of lights that fell to the dirty floor of the autopsy room.

Patricia’s corpse dropped to the floor, while the ghostly Patricia, now separated from her body, writhed violently in Frank’s arms. He backed toward the corridor of light, dragging Patricia along as a hostage.

“Come and get her, Johnny,” Frank said.

“No!” Johnny yelled, horrified. He threw Lucy to one side; she landed on the cold stone floor of the mortuary.

Dragging Patricia’s kicking spirit with him, Frank backed into the corridor of light. “Come on, Johnny,” he taunted. “If you want her . . . you got to come and get her.”

“No! No!” Johnny rushed at them, but Frank kept backing up into the corridor.

“Come on with me to the other side,” Frank yelled. “Let’s all go and be judged.”

“You can’t do this!” Johnny yelled desperately, trying to reach the spirit of the woman who Frank kept yanking away from him.

“Watch me, Johnny,” Frank said. He kept backing into the corridor. White light swirled around his captive and him and also around Johnny, who had entered the corridor and was frantically pursuing them.

The morgue and Lucy slipped from Frank’s view as images of his life swept before his eyes—his childhood, his parents, his marriage, his home.

“Give her to me,” Johnny said desperately, clutching at Patricia.

Frank reached the end of the corridor just as Johnny dived at Patricia and grabbed her in an embrace, pulling her free of Frank. Bannister held her for an instant, then let her go, sensing that Johnny had nowhere to take her now. They had crossed to the other side; they were at the end of the corridor.

Johnny embraced Patricia, who smiled at him to suggest they had won. He said, “Gotcha, baby,” and together they tried to escape back down the corridor, the white light swirling about them as if they were in a tornado.