u/ExperienceGlum428

Part 7 | Part 9

“What the fuck happened?”

Was all I could ask at the image of the damaged, ruined and almost post-apocalyptic Morlden Village that stood in front of Margaret, Luke and me. No more perfect, cozy and dementia-safe little town. The cognitive held patients were walking and continuing their lives as if their cage didn’t have turned into an actual hell.

“We took down the live-energy mining facility,” was Margaret answer which only consisted of the set-up of an idea.

Luke, even with the place now looking as damaged and torn apart as his ectoplasmic manifestation, was as confused as I was.

Crossing the road in front of us, cracked and seriously in need of a new pavement coat, Mrs. Mitchell, one of my fellow residence building E’s roommates, was lost. She was touching moldy wooden finishes of an old building while asking for the exit of the street. Disregarding the health issue, it seemed like a normal thing for her to do.

A familiar face approached her. An eerily wide smile, in the middle of a face that seemed forced as a Jack Nicholson impression on the border of popping its cheek muscles due to the strain. It was the motherfucking barber I saw on my first day here. Never saw him out of his working establishment before. And, weirdly, his silence and almost crying face were more disturbing than that of the average caregiver; which were all gone thanks to Paula’s rage.

The middle-aged man was squishing on his left hand, with cramp-inducing intent, her work tool. An almost one-foot-long, old barber blade shone against the morning sunlight. It disappeared once the sharp metal point got introduced into Mrs. Mitchell upper abdomen.

Shit.

He took the cover in blood weapon out of the elder victim.

“Hey!” I screamed just to get his attention, because I had nothing planned.

My strategy in fact achieved that.

Mrs. Mitchell collapsed into the dirty ground on the sidewalk. A fountain of red fluid burst out of her wound, as if she was the Athens of a gore-loving Poseidon (even more than the original Greek god).

I ran fast towards the quiet maniac with not really a plan in mind. He approached me in a weirdly calmed fashion, but faster than me. Luke and Margaret limited themselves to enjoying the clash as viewers.

I kneeled just a couple of feet away from him in the middle of the street.

The not so intelligent bastard tripped with my body and smashed his head against the ground.

I continued my way towards Mrs. Mitchell, who was lying in a blood pond by now. Took off my jacket. The freezing cold of the Nordic shitty and depressing climate struck my bare arms as a thousand small needles. The stiff piece of clothing worked as a rudimentary and very useless patch.

Behind me, when Margaret was approaching, she got surprised by the crazy barber. She dodged a couple of heavy swings from his knife.

My hands were starting to soak in blood as the absorbing capabilities of my warming garment had come to its limit. The old woman was so stiff that it was as if her body was refusing to me carrying her.

“Luke, get inside her!” I instructed having faith in the cognitive detriment of Mrs. Mitchell.

Luke’s ghostly form levitated towards me and disappeared into the bleeding body.

Margaret was swinging a rock from the damaged street against the barber’s head, with very little success in stopping his carnage urge.

Luke’s deformed head emerged from the already unconscious woman I was applying pressure to.

“Her mind is a maze,” Luke informed me through the supernatural-communicating earphone that was, surprisingly, still in my ear canal.

“Then solve it. I need you to help me walk her towards the medical unit.”

Luke’s peeking eyes went back inside Mrs. Mitchell.

I tied my jacket as hard as I could around the hurt old lady.

“You tried magic already?” I yelled at Margaret, who at that point I had no idea what she was doing to keep the bastard busy.

“Not that easy!”

Her squeaky voice pierced my eardrums with the sound waves vibrating through my nape.

Mrs. Mitchell, on the ground at my knees, opened her eyes as if she had just woken up from a horrible nightmare and grasped for air as much as her damaged lungs allowed her to. I pushed her into standing.

“Get up. We need to go now,” was my command to the possessed lady.

“I… can’t… can’t… breathe,” Luke said with the old woman’s airless and damaged vocal-cords voice.

I propelled the fragile skeleton covered with a thin layer of flesh towards the South. Mrs. Mitchell’s legs were giving small but steady steps.

“You don’t breathe anymore, you’ll be fine,” I assured Luke.

Top-notch ghostly pep talk if you asked me.

“Be careful,” Margaret’s voiced reached me from far away.

I turned back to encounter the barber jumping against me. He made my head hit the ground. His weight was overwhelming over my bruised body. I got dizzy. He raised his weapon covered with the dripping viscous substance that had started to coagulate already. I held his hands in place.

Luke, in Mrs. Mitchell body, turned to bleed some more while watching me struggle with another psycho killer.

“Get her to the medical unit!” I screamed as the blade was approaching me without the slightest intention of stopping.

A weird, high-pitch mumbling preceded the energy ball hitting the barber off me.

Margaret had on its right hand a glowing-energy mandala, that looked mystic as fuck, ready to be thrown against our crazy adversary.

Luke/Mrs. Mitchell and I stood up, watching the supreme-sorcerer abilities of our thankfully now ally. The barber fled away in his fours as if he was a scared puppy.

“Let’s go!” Was Margaret taking the lead in the situation.

***

We reached the medical unit in a couple of minutes. Mrs. Mitchell, unconscious, but with a walking body, was leaving a blood trail through the dystopian and maintenance-less new version of the compound. Seriously doubted it was going to be cleaned by tomorrow.

We didn’t have to knock on the main glass door. It was broken. But we did it as a courtesy to Carly before we came inside, following her desperate and confused yells.

“We need your help. Well, she needs,” I announced when we arrived at the main room.

I had been taken care of multiple times before in that same room. But, with the dust and cobwebs all around the tile-less walls and leaking ceilings, it had become a more dangerous health hazard than the five-inch gash that had drained all of Mrs. Mitchell’s blood on our way here. At least the lack of constant electricity kept the lights twinkling, making it impossible to evaluate how bad the damage was.

“The vendages are all fucking expired,” Carly brought more bad news with her once she walked into the room.

She sprinted towards us, helping me push the uncooperative body of the pale octogenary onto a table.

“All pain medication is also useless,” Carly was on a streak.

“No,” was Luke simple and almost unhearable response through Mrs. Mitchell’s mouth.

He levitated out of the old woman’s chest. Mrs. Mitchell started to convulse or some shit. For the surprise reaction of Margaret and Carly’s hysterical “what the fuck?!” shriek, I assumed no one else saw the murdered spirit of a young man leave the now unconscious body.

“Luke!” I reprehend the ghoul as if he was a toddler.

“She said there was no painkillers!”

“Grow some balls!”

“We’re losing her,” Carly, unlike Luke and I, was very on point with her information.

“We?” Margaret replied.

“Yes, WE. I need your help. Get a pen and unscrew it.”

Margaret started looking in the continuous room.

“Also get from the glass cabinet some alcohol!” Carly continued her leadership.

“Luke, get back in there and hold that body in place,” I ordered.

The ghost followed my instructions like a soldier. His ectoplasmic form flew inside Mrs. Mitchell’s shaking body.

Carly looked at me as a crazy demented patient that belong to this place, while keeping her pressure on the wound.

“It’s a ghost…”

My explanation got interrupted by Luke managing to control and stop the unvoluntary movements of the old lady at the table.

“Can’t… breathe,” was almost uncomprehensive coming out of those wrinkled and non-gesticulating lips.

“Her lung is collapsing,” Carly let me know as if I would new what to do with that information.

Before I could ask a dumb question, she got up to speed with my self-taught, antique and deficient medical formation gotten in the worst place on Earth where medicine had been practiced.

“Get the least rusty scalpel you can get.”

I left the improvised operating room at the same time Margaret returned with the pen.

While looking in broken and almost unopenable drawers, I could hear the situation getting more tense.

“Doesn’t make sense, she should be shaking like crazy right now,” Carly explained.

“He has a foreign spirit inside keeping her steady,” Margaret backed me up with the old spiritists’ scammer. “What you need this for?”

“Clean it, just need the tube.”

“Found a perfect condition needle. Does it work?” I yelled at the next room.

“A scalpel!” Carly returned an angrier and louder scream.

“Sorry, but there is not much to work here,” I mumbled to myself.

“Ready, now what?” Margaret questioned Carly across the wall.

I found a good enough for my standards knife.

“Where’s the scalpel?!” Carly was losing her shit.

I entered the room with the tool in my hand, almost running, and with a victorious smug smirk on my face.

“Here it is,” I announced as if it was the philosopher’s stone.

“Clean it,” Carly instructed me.

I emptied the rubbing alcohol bottle on top of the almost orange thing. If Mrs. Rowen didn’t die for lack of oxygen, she certainly will of tetanus.

“You push that thing around two inches deep on the hole he does in the third intercostal muscles,” the health professional informed Margaret of her duties.

I know that muscle. Before waiting for Carly to clarify with small-kids-English, I made a deep cut in the designated area all the way into Mrs. Mitchell lung.

“NOW!” Carly and I commanded Margaret at the same time.

She stuck the pen’s tube into the recently carved hole.

Mrs. Mitchell gasped as she inhaled as much air as possible.

All shit stabilized.

Luke left the poor’s woman body, leaving her unconscious and deeply breathing in the table. Margaret and I, in shock, saw Mrs. Mitchell’s almost blood-less body, which looked like she had just taken her sleep pills. Carly kept applying gausses.

“That was awful,” Luke complained.

“Don’t be such a wuss,” I replied while I caught my breath as well.

Carly looked at Margaret with a troubled face.

“You get used to him doing that.”

Carly nodded and finished her dressing work.

“Okay,” Carly took a deep breath for paranormal and supernatural assimilation. “What caused all my inventory to go to shit so quickly?”

“Not just yours. All Morlden Village is like that,” I clarified.

“Why?”

Carly connected a monitoring machine to Mrs. Mitchell. It was surprising that it had enough battery to run.

“We cut Mrs. Rowen life power supply. She can’t keep the “new and perfect” version of this place anymore.”

Margaret’s explanation made sense, and I reprehend my desire to “I told you so” to Carly, but our magical ally’s voice was different. Deeper and hoarser. Having a harder time getting enough air out.

Carly and I turned towards Margaret, who was now an old woman. Not like Mrs. Mitchell or any other deteriorated patient in this prison. She seemed like a strong, still conscious, straight standing and badass grandma. Her appearance had a familiarity to it.

“Told you there was weird shit in this place,” I couldn’t hold it back a second time.

Carly’s brain was running a thousand miles per hour trying to get up to speed with the weirdness that Luke and I had been dealing with daily.

A crash interrupted her mental process. A rain of glass shreds rattling hijacked Margaret’s, Luke’s and my attention.

“That machine of yours don’t do that sound, right?”

“No,” Carly answered me.

Well, at least the barber looney was considerate enough to give us a headstart.

“Get her on a trolley and take her out of here,” I directed Carly and Margaret.

It took them a second to comply. I grabbed the tiny scalpel I had retrieved a couple of minutes ago and cling to it as if my life depended on it.

The barber appeared in the room’s threshold with his barber blade, sharpened and shining under the inconsistent white lights from the ceiling. This was a knives battle to the dead.

Luke flew through the barber without him even noticing.

I charged him directly.

Carly pushed the litter with Mrs. Mitchell in it, while Margaret helped with the monitor.

The barber’s swing at me got interrupted when a rusty scalpel stabbed his back. Luke used his limited physical control to twist it.

The barber attempted to take it out. I took advantage of his unguarded position and slashed his arm.

The barber’s blade clanked on the floor.

Luke used a second scalpel to penetrate the crazy guy’s shoulder plate.

I did another cut in his abdomen.

Two more scalpels pierced directly to the bastard’s kidneys.

I finished by doing an “Un Chien Andalou” against the barber’s eye.

Luke’s incorporeal form took my weapon and perforated our foe’s aorta.

The heavy corpse of the creepy barber fell to the ground with a splash of his crimson internal fluid.

“Good job. You’re getting handy to control physical objects.”

“Small things are easy.”

“Let’s go, he will get back up…”

My warning got interrupted by the true of my premonition. The sluggish and clumsy standing up of this European Michael Myers (the Halloween guy, not Austin Powers) allowed us to get out of there.

On our way out, I dropped behind me all the cabinets, chemicals and medical equipment which names I didn’t know in a desperate attempt to delay our attacker. The metallic and glass impacts of the floor became obfuscated by a familiar voice coming from outside the building.

“Margaret, you traitor!”

It was Mrs. Rowen’s voice, clearly. But it felt older, more tired, hoarser. And, sure enough, once Luke and I exited the medical unit, she was there. A dozen yards away from us, blocking Carly’s and Margaret’s way. A wrinkled, hunched and arthritic old hag wearing a cape over her was making threats.

“You’ll pay for this!”

Margaret left the monitor in Carly’s care. Out of nowhere, glowing and morphing mandalas, around three-foot-wide, appeared on both her hands. Our old magic aid assumed a defensive position.

With an ease that her face muscles shouldn’t be able to handle, old Mrs. Rowen smiled and turned her dark and hope-sucking eyes on me.

“Bring him to me,” Mrs. Rowen said to the barber killer that was stumping towards me from inside the medical building.

Mrs. Rowen’s attention got back towards Margaret. Burning hot clouds of ash materialized around the old manager’s body.

“Keep him busy,” I indicated Luke.

He nodded.

Mrs. Rowen threw a black gas sphere against Margaret, who used her mystic dishes as a shield. A spell battle, between the witch that had been in control of this dementia village since forever and the recently turned into the bright side helper, broke lose.

I approached Carly. She was petrified and mentally overstimulated by everything that was happening. I shook her a little bit to bring her back to the present. She wasn’t cooperating. I respectfully slapped her, just to get her out of her trance.

“Get her into residence building A,” I whispered at her ear.

Just partially aware of what was happening, she nodded a thousand times.

A ball of light-devoid dust impacted on one of Margaret’s magical shields, changing its trajectory to the sky. It fell over us. I violently pushed Margaret and the mobile bed with the already difficult time breathing Mrs. Mitchell out of harm’s way. The back of my head felt a blazing temperature as it got covered in dark particles.

My painful cry got Carly out of her trance. Surely is still avoiding acceptance of what’s happening, but at least her head was in the game. She began pushing her patient towards the indicated residences.

Back from me, just outside the medical unit building, Luke’s non-physical ghostly form was using his abilities to pull and yank the psycho barber, who kept on throwing swings with his homicidal tool against my friend. All his attacks went through Luke causing him no harm. It was like watching a not very smart kid fighting a mosquito.

On Margaret’s hands, both her supernatural plates grew spikes around their circumference, creating some weird sparkling saws. She tossed one of them against her opponent, but Mrs. Rowen deviated it with a hellish blizzard of ash and melting rocks that came from behind her.

The mystical circular saw rolled in the air before landing perpendicularly against the grass, just down from the external ladder that led up to the health building’s roof. Margaret closed her hands and then pushed them apart, growing the kaleidoscopic shield she still had with her. The radial geometric saw made of pure magic, still engraved in the ground, did the same.

Mrs. Rowen summoned a shadowy smog wall and sent it against Margaret. The witchcraft battle continued.

I ran towards the external ladder fixed in the wall of the medical facility, jumping the six-foot-wide glowing saw half buried into the ground. Some of my muscles teared under my weight and inertia of falling when I hold into the metallic rungs. I contained my discomfort, letting out an order:

“Luke, help Carly!”

Carly was already a couple of yards away, but was having a hard time pushing the uncooperative Mrs. Mitchell. Luke nodded at me again and left alone the barber with murderous tendencies.

The barber’s blade assassin charged towards me. Without missing a bit, I started my ascent towards the roof.

My arms beg me to give them a rest.

The ladder shook under the weight of my pursuer.

My soles slipped in the frictionless steps.

The barber growled like a confused predator.

I crawled my way into the ceiling and dashed my way across the big, surprisingly still-holding roof.

The end of the ladder trembled with every thump taken up by Mrs. Rowen’s minion.

From there, I could see the whole Morlden Village, falling to pieces as if it was having a crossover with “Silent Hill.” From beyond the walls keeping me trapped, a normal, dementia-village-ignoring European town was having a normal winter’s day.

The barber’s eyes peeked an inch into the roof.

I charged him, inverting our roles.

The now prey continued raising his head over the ceiling level.

I field-goaled his head with all my strength.

The brawl mass that apparently wouldn’t die lost his grip on the ladder, flew a little, dropped at least nine feet towards the ground and landed on Mrs. Rowen magical saw. His head got detached from his body. He stopped moving.

The blood covered mystical construct disappeared.

The spell war between evil manager and good caregiver continued. It was like a Marx prophecy come true, but with magic.

I hadn’t managed to breathe again when the fucking slasher villain of a barber started twitching again. His arms, stiff and with unvoluntary spasms, pulled the head back to his neck. Like if he was fighting his damaged body, nature’s wish for him to stay down and death itself, the barber got back on his feet.

Fuck. Another idiot idea. I hate those.

I jumped from the building aiming at the reanimated barber.

Bullseye.

Landing over him cushioned my fall, yet my bones felt like they had been used as a molcajete (mortar and pestle). The big, smirking, non-blinking guy who succumbed to my weight, kept fighting his own clumsiness and dizziness as he recovered his spatial understanding.

I ran away of the zombie barber and the witches’ battle.

***

“Go help Margaret.”

Luke’s ectoplasmic self did a military gesture and disappeared from the lobby of residence building A in which I had just arrived.

Carly, for once, didn’t give a shit about me talking “alone.” She was too busy trying to keep Mr. Bunn away from the delicate Mrs. Mitchell.

“Please, I love her!” Was Mr. Bunn’s cry.

No matter how many times Carly told him that she was okay, just needed some space, the octogenary was relentless.

I knocked loudly against the closest door to the common area. It was, of course, locked by something heavy on the other side.

“There’s no one here,” Carly said while keeping weak Mr. Bunn at a safe distance from the catatonic patient.

I ignored her.

“Elisa!” I kept banging on the door. “I know you are there! We need you.”

“Go away.” Elisa’s strong, wise voice came from inside the room.

“Who’s her?” Carly asked, surprised that someone was still making a stand in such a damaged and unsecure residence building.

“She’s the love of my life!” Mr. Bunn’s complaints were getting tiresome.

I ignored them both and left Carly deal with him a little. I was almost in a self-imposed hostage situation.

“Elisa,” was time to exercise my negotiation skills. “I can take down this door, leaving the whole room vulnerable. I don’t want to do that. We need help with a much bigger situation and a safe place to stash Mrs. Mitchell…”

“My love!”

“Shut up, Mr. Bunn!” I yelled angrily, then calmed myself again. “A motherfucker maniac is after us and you can’t just keep on hiding here from Mrs. Rowen because she’s fucking insane.”

No word from the other side of the room. Just a heavy breathing.

“Elisa, right?” Carly approached the door. “I know you’re scared.”

A chirp came from outside the building. It moved across the wall and towards the main door.

“I’m not even sure what it is that’s going on here, to be honest,” Carly continued her soft and empathic approach. “Until a couple of hours, I still believed this was just a very fancy place to help cognitively held patients.”

I placed myself in between the main doors, the unconscious patient and Mr. Bunn. The creak kept approaching and didn’t sound helpful to our interests.

“Get fast to the point,” I mumbled loudly enough for Carly to hear.

“I’m afraid of this place, of Mrs. Rowen, the ghosts and creatures he talks about all the time. But I can’t just stay hiding.” Carly continued talking to the shut door. “Not only for me, for Mrs. Mitchell here and the rest of people who are really unable to do that.”

The barber, full of injuries and a deformed face, kicked the main doors of the building open in an unnecessary aggressive way.

A squeak, constant and ear-piercing, came from Elisa’s room.

She opened her door.

As Carly pulled the trolley held down by Mr. Bunn’s uncooperative grieve, I pushed it towards the unblocked area of the building while avoiding the dull blade swings that came my way. I just got one big slash on my back.

After we were all inside the small, and weirdly still maintained room, I closed the door using my whole weight to hold the crazy killer on the other side. Elisa and Carly watched me having a hard time, while Mr. Bunn was still useless begging at Mrs. Mitchell peaceful rest (how much I envied her at that time).

“Get the furniture here!”

Carly and Elisa finally joined the situation and pushed the rotten ebony dressing table against the thin barrier I was keeping standing to separate us from the barber serial killer.

The table’s weight prevented the guy from pushing it open. Its height was perfect to avoid the knob from turning completely. Its dimensions matched the tiny welcome area of the room down to the inch, making it unmovable. It was absurd how safe Elisa’s accommodations were, especially considering it was one of the two bedrooms not used by a cognitively deteriorated patient in a compound made to keep people with dementia unharmed.

“What’s going on?” Elisa questioned.

“That guy out there,” I started talking over the poundings on the door behind me, “ he was this fucking place’s barber.”

Carly and Elisa looked at me wondering how I knew that. Irrelevant.

“Now Mrs. Rowen wants him to deliver me to her,” I concluded.

“Shit.”

Elisa’s single word answer was hiding something. Before I could ask her, Luke appeared in the window.

“I need you to open it quickly,” my ghostly friend asked me.

I did. Carly and Elisa stared at me as if I was on the same mental wavelength as the sobbing Mr. Bunn there. I’m already used to that.

The barber’s hitting on the door stopped, but nobody noticed nor considered worthy of attention.

I opened the glass just enough for Luke to get inside the souvenir he was physically carrying in his left hand. I secured the second entrance to our trench. Luke let Margaret’s bracelet fall on the floor between the living watchers.

“How did that float into here?” Elisa continued with her not-up-to-speed questions.

In between the whispers of Carly explaining Luke’s ghoulish existence (which she herself doubted) to Elisa, and Mr. Bunn’s exponentially louder shrieks, I got the information that really mattered from Luke.

From below the dressing table that was maintaining our foe at a safe distance from us, tiny blood streams started swirling towards us. The fucker was now killing more elders to draw us out.

“Why’s Margaret’s amulet not with her?” Elisa kept demanding to know information that, in this case, couldn’t be provided by Carly.

“Luke says that Mrs. Rowen managed to knock it out of her wrist,” I synthetized the events.

Elisa’s worried and wrinkled face turned into an almost dehydrated horror one. Her strong lungs pronounced a single word for the second time in the night (a new record): “Shit.”

I skimmed through the bedroom looking for some sort of weapon. The closest to it was Elisa’s walker. Why she had one, if she didn’t even use it before getting his ring and strength back, is beyond me. Snatched it and tore one of the metal legs against the floor.

***

With my improvised, half-bent aluminum, short bo staff, I opened the door that led to the lobby of the residence building we had taken as headquarters. Elisa and Carly closed the door behind me as soon as I was out of the way. Such lack of trust was hurting.

As expecting, just outside our fortress, a collapsed old man I’d never seen before was dealing with having his whole neck slashed. It was like a second mouth that vomited all the blood that the poor man’s inefficient heartbeats managed to pump.

And, waiting, at the other side of the lobby, over the caregiver’s bed, was the unkillable murderous machine that wanted me for his master. He stood up from the bed and tracked my every move with his dark, soulless eyes.

I step closer to him.

He dashed towards me as if I had just shot the start gun.

I strongly clasped the metal improvised defense hardware I had provided myself, and baseballed the bastard’s head. I was really sporty that day.

My attacker crumbled to the ground, in the same state as Mrs. Mitchell at the other side of the door. His heavy and stiff limbs caused a little rumbling in the building. Surprisingly, the now old, humid and never cared for building didn’t give in over my head.

The wooden barrier that protected my allies, and had been used by them to deliver me as a sacrifice to the unconscious motherfucker, opened slowly again. Carly and Elisa now did want a sneak peek to the action.

I dashed into the kitchen, that thankfully still had its sharp cutting knife inside the plastic dementia-proof box. I snatched the real weapon.

I proceeded to drag the unmoving barber’s corpse, that soon was going to wake up, towards our safe room.

“Luke, get inside him,” I commanded my supernatural friend.

Carly and Elisa looked at the empty space between them where they inferred Luke was.

“I can’t…”

“Of course you can! You got inside Mrs. Mitchel mind, managed to physically fight this fucker and even retrieved Margaret’s bracelet. You’re so fucking badass, this is just an empty carcass.”

Luke watched me for a couple of seconds. I meant what I said. He disappeared inside the corpse I had just brought.

Carly and Elisa glanced at me, expecting I would give them the plan instructions. Luckily, since before my last encounter, I had a solid one already running.

“Let’s go help Margaret.”

***

The barber, possessed by Luke, dragged me into Mrs. Rowen’s office.

Upon entering there, my shinbone, broken when I was a kid by a witch, started to burn as it usually did in that place. I reprehend the pain to keep up my act as an unconscious prisoner. My feet bumped into a couple of fallen pictures that couldn’t support being hung anymore by rusty nails to the now cracking walls.

On the opposite side of the decolored and moldy desk, Mrs. Rowen was patiently waiting for me. I had my eyes closed, yet I felt her vicious smile.

Luke, using the man who had been hunting me for the whole day, sat me in the chair I had used countless times before. The big, scarred hand that wielded the barber’s knife slapped my face. I pretended to wake up and be confused.

So close to Mrs. Rowen, even under the fainting lightbulbs resulting from her poor control of the village, I distinguished she looked so similar to the old lady that received me on my first night here. For the unexperienced and ignorant, they would have passed as twins. Same fissured nails, yellow teeth and almost dripping skin.

“My God, maybe now you need to be taken in as a patient here,” I mockingly provoked the witch on the other side of the room.

“Maybe I’ll intern you again. Would you like that?”

Her hoarse voice that came from the air she could get in her mouth (nothing got all the way to her lungs) chilled me. I was at a complete disadvantage. Yet, it wasn’t my first rodeo.

“You want an asthma inhaler?”

With a force unlikely to her appearance, she stood up and hit the table. It squeaked a little and, against all odds, stayed complete.

“Shut the fuck up! You should be begging for mercy.”

She sounded so convinced about her threat that I almost fell for it.

From the back of my pants, I retrieved the kitchen knife from residence building A and pointed it at Mrs. Rowen. She contemplated my move for a couple of seconds, then laughed maniacally.

“Are you really that stupid?” She asked while taking her seat in a more relaxed corporality and mood.

“No.”

I turned the knife against my throat and pretended to go for the kill. Mrs. Rowen flinched for a second, just an almost imperceptible instant of weakness. That’s all I needed to make sure I had the upper hand, for now.

“Where’s Margaret?” I demanded to know.

Mrs. Rowen stared deeply into my eyeballs. In absolute silence. My shinbone erupted in discomfort, as if it was covered in flames. I sucked it in.

I impaled the knife more decidedly on my neck. My adversary got closer to stop me, before going back to her chair. A couple drops of the red living fluid rolled down the blade.

“She’s in the shed.”

I smiled knowing that phase one had worked. That was the easy one.

I stand up from my squeaky and in mid-putrefaction seat, still with the oxidated kitchen gadget in my breathing system.

“The shed keys.”

I extended my free hand towards Mrs. Rowen. She learned her lesson and cooperated from the first time. The bulky keychain she had stashed in her drawer was in my possession almost immediately.

Using the back of the kitchen handle, I smashed in a thousand pieces the dusty window that connected the office with the exterior. It worked because of the decaying state of the glass, sure, but it was expected that everything would be in that deplorable situation.

The barber attacked Mrs. Rowen. Her old body snapped when she turned around to see what was happening. Too late. The barber blade stabbed her in the abdomen, creating a bigger wound than that endured by Mrs. Mitchell.

“Die!” Mrs. Rowen exhaled.

The old, wounded witch threw a deadly spell against her servant.

Luke ejected his specter form out of the body receiving the magic assault just in time.

On impact, the crazy barber was thrown back against the spoilt wooden wall, making it crack.

Luke flew in front of me, snatched the keys I had laying on my hand, and whirled into the freezing sunset.

The elder killer, kept under control by his daywork in a barbershop, dropped inertly to the floor. His stiff muscles contracted. His skin rotted in record time and pulled his mouth and eyes open widely. He died as a decomposed mummy, for good.

Mrs. Rowen coughed loudly and profusely, trying to say something. But her collapsing lungs and mouth full of blood prevented it. I didn’t want to hear her further.

I sought in all the drawers, cabinets and folders inside her office. The exit keys, the ones to open the main gates that were holding captive in this haunted village, were nowhere to be found. I kicked a metallic file organizer while Mrs. Rowen’s final exhalation came out of her.

I left that place through the broken window, carefully to avoid any cut, and sprinted towards the North. Just a couple of yards before arriving at the shed.

Outside it, the chains and lock waited for me on the floor. The entrance was wide open. The light from the dusk was the only thing that allowed me to make sense of the absolute mess that the shed had turned into. Dirty, dusty and rusty. Even worse than when I got inside it the first time.

Luke, as a ghost, was trying to use his sometimes still failing physical capabilities to insert Margaret’s bracelet on her wrist. But, our ally, who had sacrificed for us, was now a true patient of the Morlden Village. Hunched, weak, trembling and without any sense of self, where or when. Like if floating jewelry wasn’t something to worry about, she turned away and complained about wanting to be naked.

I grabbed her before she had the chance to take her desire into her own hands. Luke slid the bracelet into place. Margaret, the elder but strong and mentally capable version of her, returned.

“That was awful.”

“Sure. Where does Mrs. Rowen hid the main entrance keys?”

“In the safe. Hid?”

“Yes. Luke stabbed her. But I couldn’t find the missing keys.”

Luke smiled proud of himself and nodded at Margaret, even when he knew she couldn’t see him.

Margaret’s face lost all its color in an instance.

“That’s not enough.”

An eardrum-drilling shriek rumbled the shed from outside.

Part 6 | Part 8

That deep, beast-like roar gave me chills that made all my body hairs stand up as a military squad. Not Margaret, Luke, me or Paula’s inert body knew what the fuck caused it. The elders with cognitive detriment who just got their souls back acted as if they didn’t even notice anything wrong, which honestly is how they react to anything that happens in their haunted dementia village.

My dream team, composed of the no longer witch-controlled caregiver Margaret and my undead ghost friend that only I could see and hear through my special earphone, left the movie theater of the Morlden Village. We tried to pinpoint what caused the disruption. Nothing, just the always-creepy reality of this place, full of octogenarians whom most of the time don’t even know who they are.

Margaret walked unusually slow and with a curved back, almost like she had a hump.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her. “You know what could had been that noise?”

“No,” she replied on a volume lower than her self-confident-less normal one. “It’s just… Mrs. Rowen.”

“I told you there was something wrong with her!” Luke yelled excited, with I being the only listener.

“She’s weird, I’ll give you that.”

“You think that’s all?” Margaret looked at me with incredulous eyes.

I didn’t think that was all. I was just trying to support her beliefs. To be honest, till this moment, I still don’t have a lot of information about her.

“She is very aware of what happens here,” Margaret continued. “By now she should know about the movie theater. And surely, she’ll like to get some answers about whatever the fuck just caused that motherfucking roar.”

That tone, language and violent manner of speaking was new to her. It suited her.

“Well,” I tried being the positive one for once. “Let’s hope we don’t encounter her.”

“Hope you’re not talking about me.”

Mrs. Rowen approached us as if we had just summoned her. She looked different. It was clearly the same woman I met a couple of months ago, but seemed older. From a young and healthy woman, now she appeared with wrinkles around her eyes, the first gray hairs were badly hidden, and her overall body language was tired, weaker, older.

“What happened?” The manager of this place demanded to know.

My shinbone, broken when I was an infant by a witch, started to burn a little, as it always did on her office, and every time I was in the presence of some supernatural evil shit. Mrs. Rowen was a manipulating bitch, yet, somehow, I knew she had her reasons to not hurt me. That made me cocky.

“We’re figuring it out.”

“I’m talking about the movie theater. What did you do in there?”

“Well, you see, there was this…”

“Paula got hurt,” Margaret interrupted me before I spilled the beans. “She said she wanted it all for herself and fucked it all up with the projector.”

I just glanced confused as they exchanged ideas. Luke, invisible by my side, was equally confused.

“Is that so?” Mrs. Rowen wasn’t falling for it.

“Yes, it was messy.” I thought that would be a great way to add to the story.

“I want a more detailed report about it.”

“Sure, Mrs. Rowen. Let’s go to your office,” Margaret told her boss.

Both started their lazy strolling away.

“And you,” Mrs. Rowen pointed at me when turning back. “I don’t want you involved in anything more.”

“You told me you brought me there to help you with this place.”

Mrs. Rowen and Margaret’s condemning stares made me shut up with my insolence.

Luke and I watched as the evil manager and our new ally turned left in the main avenue of this place. Once out of sight, I turned the opposite way towards the medical unit, which I had learned to call home.

“Where are you going now?” Luke asked me.

“To my bed. I didn’t sleep at all last night.”

“But, what about the noise? And that bitch?”

“Seems like for now, Margaret has it under control.”

“We still don’t know why that bitch sent me to that island to die.”

“That’s correct, not yet. Let me just get some sleep, please. After that we will go to get answers from that evil witch.”

Luke finally gave in.

“You know that building E is the opposite way, right?”

His never-ending questions are a trait you just learn to love; or at least you try.

“I do. But my back still burns like a bitch.”

***

My rest was short and mediocre. I dreamed about my grandmother, like I had been doing since my first night in this logic-devoid place.

I was back at my grandma’s Victorian house. Or what was left of it. Broken planks; torn sheets, clothes and curtains; damaged China plates; and spring-pierced furniture were partially buried under ashes, rocks and soil. It seemed like a hurricane had just impacted the three stories home and transformed it into a warzone. In the middle, supporting herself with a table leg, was my grandmother.

I was there with her. The mud and debris were drying inside my socks. The air was heavy to breathe, and the Sun masked behind dense clouds was almost imperceptible. The weak and faint cry of my elder grandmother pierced my ears.

When I looked at her, she had an appearance that I had seen before. Not like the previous dreams where my subconscious simply knew that old lady was my mother’s mother because of the weird nature of Morpheus realm. I had those evil-looking eyes tattooed in my memory. That wrinkled, almost melting skin had been felt by ankle a lot of time ago. That pointy nose, that I could have sworn was a prosthetic, had haunted me before. Her unsettling smile that, until recently, I believed it was just a nightmare product of a childhood trauma.

She was the witch that, when I was just an infant, threw me down the slide. She was the one who broke my leg all those years ago.

“Why didn’t you read my letter?”

It was her only complaint before a cold airflow pushed me out of balance, and out of my dream.

***

A freezing breath from my left woke me up. I also knew what it was when I saw it.

It had huge claws clinging to the wooden floor. Mean-spirited, completely devoid of life eyes were frowning directly at me. Its almost four-inch teeth filled a V-shaped jaw. All the creature’s body had the same rocky, cold and smooth texture. Big wings made sure any light that might filter through the window was obfuscated before reaching me. It was the almost two-meter-high dragon statue that worked as a landmark of residence building b.

Shit.

The bastard roared, on the same pitch and sound that we heard in the movie theater. I experience it one foot away. It damaged my eardrums (at this point, I’m not sure how those keep recovering.)

I rolled out of my bed forward, avoiding a swing from its rock paw.

I poorly landed on the ground.

“Luke, care to see what this shit is!”

My ectoplasmic friend adopted his visible form before throwing himself against our unsettling-moving and perfectly carved foe. His immaterial self hit and bounced against the alive statue, making it just flinch for a second.

“I can’t get into it,” was Luke’s vague explanation (very like him.)

I stood up while he stated the obvious.

“Just keep it distracted,” I ordered him.

Before checking Luke’s idea for that, I fled my room. Escaped residence building E. Ran across the dark, cold and abandoned-looking Morlden Village at midnight. The paths were just lit by the warm streetlights.

I slept through the day. Everyone was now in bed. How the fuck that roar didn’t woke anyone?

Without checking my back to make sure I was not being followed, I reached the staff quarters. I infiltrated the place in the fastest way I managed to reach Margaret’s room without waking others. Laid down on my belly to corroborate there was nothing under her bed, and finally proceeded to wake her up, covering her mouth to prevent her from making any sound.

“I know what caused the roar,” I informed my uncontrolled ally.

She limited herself to open her eyes almost like pool balls.

“Dragon statue, alive,” I continued my explanation with as few words as the English language allowed me. “Luke can’t help.”

I took my hand away from her face.

“Who’s Luke?”

Fuck. No option but to trust her.

“It’s a ghost friend of mine,” I confessed one of my biggest secrets to her.

“Sure,” Margaret answered like it wasn’t a big deal that a motherfucking dead guy had been following and helping me. “There’s already a soul in the statue.”

“Wait. Who?”

Before I received an answer, the thin moonlight that was shining on us through her window disappeared.

Margaret and I peeked through the glass to confirm what we already knew. The dragon statue was just outside.

I pulled Margaret out of bed.

The living landmark flexed its legs and fold its wings.

I snatched my just awaken friend outside of her room.

CRASH!

A glass shower flooded the bedroom as the mythological creature burst inside.

As I yanked Margaret through the hallway of the staff quarters, I knocked on every door I passed.

“What are you doing?” Margaret was still sleepy.

The stone creature, walking on its four legs, exited into the hallway.

“Hoping to get a distraction.”

All the chambers occupied with Margaret’s fellow caregivers opened.

“Shit…”

I interrupted Margaret as I got her out of the building.

From outside, we heard desperate shrieks, that became pain cries before dying in barely audible sobbing. Some lights twinkled, others went out directly. Heavy thumps marched through the building. Wood and (what after many encounters like this I had learned to recognize as) bone cracked. Cloth and flesh get torn in equal parts. Blotching sounds accompanied the hellish symphony.

“We need to go!”

The frozen and shocked Margaret seemed like she needed someone to tell her the obvious.

“Paula is out of control,” she mumbled.

“Paula? Like the bitch who had wanted me death since day one?”

Of course, no answer.

The beast, bathed in caregivers’ blood, burst through the main door of the staff quarters. Wood, blinds and personal affairs flew like projectiles toward us.

I jumped over Margaret, making her take cover against the ground.

“Any ideas, Luke?”

I searched for Luke on that stary night. He was as out of his element, as I.

“I had an idea,” Margaret declared.

She stood up and firmly approached the dragon. The once immovable thing returned to its roots and respired in place. (It pretended to have lungs?)

“What is she doing?” Luke questioned me.

I raised my bruised body from the ground.

“I hope something not as stupid as it looks like.”

A couple of yards away from the stone monster, Margaret stopped. Started moving her hands in front of her face as if she was trying to flap the dragon with dance moves. Her mouth was speeding too faintly to hear and too rapidly to read her lips.

Luke and I just watched how the beast seemed mesmerized by those movements.

A fireball materialized out of nowhere into Margarets hands. Kind of levitating, not burning her. She played a little with it.

Carefully, I stepped closer to her.

She magically threw the conjured fire as a projectile against the statue.

I kneeled to pick up a flare gun that had come out of the staff quarters. I’m oblivious about why any caregiver would have had that in their room.

The dragon caught the flame with its jaws and swallowed it. As if it was a little puppy playing with a ball.

I grabbed Margaret’s hand from behind.

The mystical creature roared into the night sky, and an inferno came out of its throat. Great, now that shit breathed fire.

I aimed my non-lethal weapon, and shot it directly at the creature’s eye. The red flare exited the barrel. In a blink, the red light engulfed the whole scene. It impacted on the stone carved sight organs (that I’m not sure were working organs.)

Blam!

The projectile exploded in the dragon’s face.

ROAR!

I pulled Margaret with me to back up.

The van-sized beast tried to use its gargantuan paws, with sharp talons and no opposing thumbs, to scratch the red burning light from its face.

Margaret, Luke and I reached the park that is just in front of the now uninhabited staff quarters, the one with the artificial river.

“This water has to come from somewhere, I need you to find it,” I indicted Margaret.

She nodded firmly and started crawling through the whole artificial body of water. I ran to the North.

“Luke, you buy her time.” Before he could ask, I responded. “Any way you can!”

I kicked open the shed doors with the impulse I had gathered from my sprinting. The place wasn’t like before. The pristine and organized shed that supernaturally had come into existence was now a dusty, old and disorganized wooden box meant to haul everything that didn’t have a proper function.

Yet, I was not in a reflective moment to figure out what happened. I looked in between paint cans, rusty tools and broken decorative items until I found, in the darkest corner, what I was looking for.

I exited the dark storage building with an industrial hose over my shoulder. Luke was slamming rubbish he had found from the ruins of the staff quarters, making an annoying sound to keep the dragon busy. How strong is his ability to affect the physical world?! (Another question for another time.)

I reached the park where Margaret was already waiting for me with the water all the way through her knees.

“Here it is!” She announced me.

I dropped the hose. Splash!

Fuck. The once unalive statue focused on us.

“My bad,” I apologized.

I placed the end of the hoe on the tap that fed the artificial pond.

The fire-breathing creature swirled towards us, Leaving Luke behind us.

Margaret opened the faucet all the way.

The monster prepared for combustion.

Water busted out of the hoe a thousand miles per hour.

The creature attempted to torch us.

Those opposing elements fought in the space between us, morphing in vapor. I yelled as I felt the heat evaporating my sweat. The dragon took his ground and continued his attack. The liquid coming from the hose remained constant and powerful. Margaret, placed behind me, helped me support the heavy and unpredictable tube I was holding.

The stone creature paused to recover his breath.

Our water gun didn’t have that issue. A fountain cascaded over our enemy.

But, Morlden Village’s reserves of the precious liquid run out. The water pressure from our improvised weapon failed.

The imposing, heavy beast was still there. Its carved rocky skin was just wet. Its eyes were frowned in an aggressive and threating matter against us.

“What did you expected to happen?” Margaret asked.

The creature shook itself as a hound to dry itself. Did a mediocre job.

“Water beats fire,” was my response.

The stone dragon’s head came closer to us.

Margaret and I dropped the hose as if we both received command from our brains to give up at the same time.

“You fucking fat lizard!” Luke screamed from behind the monster.

Not sure it could hear him. But it sure felt the ectoplasm-made human using his new abilities to yank its tail.

The roasting mythic animal turned back to figure out what was bothering it. Of course, it didn’t find anything. Just wagged its tail with a brutal force strong enough to throw the non-physical ally into the air.

Once the cryptid returned to its main dish, Margaret and I were already escaping that place.

***

“If Paula’s inside that thing, how do we make her stop?” I questioned Margaret without stopping.

“We hurt her in a way that truly affects her.”

“How?”

Margaret turned to her right without answering me. I followed her into the supermarket as the Sun was starting to shine in the East horizon.

We crossed the moldy and rotten food aisles and ventured into the underground level.

“So, we are meant to go to the hanging corpses room?”

“Exactly,” was Margaret’s simple answer.

She tried opening the door. It was locked as expected.

“Why do we need to get there?”

“You haven’t figure it out?”

Fucking condescending attitude of hers. I shook my head.

“Mrs. Margaret created here and in the movie theater a soul/life-energy draining system.”

She was insane. But, at this point, so was I. In the context of my life, now this made perfect sense.

“And Paula needs this because…?”

“This is how Mrs. Rowen keeps her powers working.”

“The perfect appearance of Morlden Village?”

“And immortality for her and her coven,” Margaret concluded.

Shit. Of course she was a witch. That explained a lot of things.

“We need to open that door,” I went back into the present manner. “Can you get the keys from Mrs. Rowen office?”

The dragon’s roar rumbled through the building and our muscles.

“No time,” Margaret assured me.

She started running towards the stairs that led to the supermarket. I followed her into the health-hazardous store. It was now open and with a couple of clients inside.

“What the fuck with the people here?”

Now it was ridiculous. No matter how far the patients’ dementia was, it was impossible that they still acted like nothing was happening and continued their days as normal. A motherfucking dragon really should discourage this type of shit.

“Mrs. Rowen keeps this running,” was Margaret’s vague enough answer to maintain her mysterious aura. “Find something to open the door.”

After giving me that order, she disappeared in the left corridor.

I went to the other side to find some sort of wrench. My luck was jinxed. Bread, milk, backpacks, pencils and vegetables. How the fuck was this place organized? There was nothing that could get us through the metal door in the basement.

CRASH!

The center skylight in the warehouse ceiling precipitated into the customers and products under the weight of the stone magic beast that apparently had learned to use its wings.

THUMP!

It was the sound the creature made when landing, crashing on the concrete floor of the supermarket. It left a crater and crakes that swirled in a five-yard radius. It started sniffing as if the carved nostrils were connected to actual smell-sensitive receptors.

I squatted and kept my position low behind a shelf of spoilt carrots.

To my right, an old woman pushed a shopping cart into the bread and pasta aisle, which now was a vestige of its former self under the massive creature.

“Ma’am!” I whispered at her.

She didn’t stop. Without losing my cover, I snatched her arm and pulled her towards me. It was Mrs. Pike (she lives with me on residence building E.) I immobilized her with a wrestling improvised position and made her shut with my hand over her mouth.

The shopping cart lost its balance by the strong clenching of the octogenarian I kept with me.

Clank!

The dragon turned towards the fallen vehicle. Its heavy steps were getting closer. The sniffing and air grasping of the creature were easy to distinguish. A sudden heat wave that accompanied it reached me.

To my right, the beast’s jaws were inspected the cart.

I pulled myself with the old Mrs. Pike against the rack.

She tried to move and free herself from me.

The living statue’s wings opened in the air, casting a shadow over us.

The carrots shelf was puncturing my burned back.

The cryptid was turning its head towards us.

Clank!

Something hit the back of the creature, making it slither around itself. It was an old man who pushed a shopping cart against the mystical being while trying to reach for his cereal.

“Sorry, do you know where can I find…?”

The elder got interrupted when the three-foot-wide jaws bit him.

Blotch. Crack!

Blood flew out of the lower half of the man’s body, which still stood up straight for a couple of seconds after being ripped away from its upper half. Bones got shredded under the biting force of the moving monument.

I took advantage of this distraction and, with my belt, tied sweet Mrs. Pike to a sturdy-looking rack. I placed an apple inside her teethless mouth to prevent her from making any sound. I crawled away.

The monster went back to its hunting, returning to where it was searching before being so senselessly interrupted.

I stared at the scene from the canned food aisle.

The creature pushed the fallen cart.

I found a Campbell’s soup.

The bloodlust landmark’s head turned towards where I had left poor old Mrs. Pike.

I threw the conservative-filled soup against the quadruple monster.

Clink!

I hid behind the can rack.

The monster’s tail whipped another shelf as it turned.

“Aaaghhh!”

The pain shriek of an old man. Evidently, someone whose worst enemy is a three-inch-high step would have had a hard time enduring being hit by a cleaning supplies rack.

Fuck.

I threw another can over my head, without looking, hoping that my non-existent grenade experience will distract the human-eating thing.

Another heavy thump.

I threw a third can over me.

Clink.

If fell back on my feet.

Clank.

The soup poured out of the can.

I raised my head to encounter the blood-dripping teeth of the mystical creature over me.

I rolled out of the falling jaws’ way.

I dragged myself through the debris covered aisle. The crazy chomping beast glided towards me. My kicks with rubber soles were futile against its rock-made nose.

“Where the fuck are the caregivers when you need them?!” I yelled in desperation.

“She killed them all,” was the most badass answer to my prayer that Margaret could had come out when jumping into the creature’s back.

With a metallic broom stick, the still human of the friends attacked the statued one.

Pang! Pang! Pang!

I’ve heard that sound before. It reminded me of what being in prison was like. It used to freeze me in place. Not anymore.

The dragon lifted its front legs in the air, making Margaret slip down its back. She rolled to the front door. The heavy, human-less monster by this point, fell towards her. Its elephant-sized paws hitting the ground rumbled the damaged supermarket. The animal that should only exist in myths and monuments trapped Margaret in between its legs, tail and wings.

The frenetic survival mode turned off for a second. The killing machine of stone went back into its more pacific, contemplative state.

“Please, Paula,” mumbled Margaret to the creature she was at its mercy.

The vocal cords-less monster magically roared against its friend from previous life. It was an intimidation display.

Clank!

“Leave her alone, bitch!” I yelled to the fucker after throwing her my second to last can of pineapples.

I tossed my last projectile. It hit the dragon’s wing. It turned to me with its mouth already open.

Shit.

I docked as the creature expelled fire from its bowels.

The shelf behind me became hot as fuck. The non-good for drinking juices evaporated as soon as their bottles melted. The flames flew over me for almost a minute.

Once it stopped, cautiously left my cover to look at the pissed of beast. Time slowed down a lot.

The big as a car dragon opened its wings in a swift motion that pushed all the dust away. My ally had stood up, and my eyes made direct contact with hers. The beast lifted its front legs high in the air as its lungless chest produced an anger-filled cry. Margaret turned away from me, from the creature, and got herself out of what was left of the supermarket.

That fucking bitch left me.

I abandoned the stone cryptid’s trajectory.

The old man who got hit by the rack a couple of minutes ago caught my attention.

“Please, help me!”

The dragon hit the wall and left a hole through which sunlight entered to the supermarket ruins.

I pushed the shelf away from the elderly, who kept crying and not moving.

The mystical creature returned and was ready to assault me again.

I tried pulling back the old man who wasn’t cooperating at all and wanted me to do all the heavy lifting. The stone creature shook debris from its back as it approached.

The guy suddenly stood up on his own without previous notice.

“Turns out it is easy to possess people with dementia disconnected through panic,” told me the old man.

“Luke?”

“Whatever you are planning to do, do it quickly!”

As fast as that weak body allowed him, Luke screamed and strolled away to get the beast’s attention. I watched the futile attempt for a couple of seconds before a stupid idea popped into my mind.

Paula-inhabited monument was ready to have its piece of the old useless man when I yelled at her.

“Hope you are ready to say goodbye to your youth!”

The angry, blood-thirsty monster saw me directly in the top step that led to the basement. It clearly knew what I meant, it jumped against me like a raging bull.

I went down two steps at the time with the heavy statue breaking the metal floating steps behind me under its weight.

I jumped the last couple of steps.

The stairway collapsed. The dragon lost its balance with it.

I didn’t stop until I reached the end of the hallway.

The monster got back into its feet in a couple of seconds and gave me its meanest glare.

“Come and get me, bitch,” I indicated her with a calmed, almost monastic tone.

The beast didn’t spare a second before rushing towards me.

I breathed deeply.

Its aspirations grew in intensity.

I closed my eyes.

It leaped against me.

I collapsed my body to the ground.

BAM!

The creature smashed the metal door open.

I followed her inside the hanging carcasses maze.

Dragon Paula retrieved her senses. A piece from her nostrils and upper jaw fell after the impact.

I hid behind a wrinkled and pale dead body connected to multiple soul sucking tubes.

The nose-less beast continued hunting.

I dropped the body from its hanging hook. The hoes disconnected from it and twisted in the ground as the green looking fluid kept coming out of them.

The mythic animal got over it.

I hid behind someone else.

The creature growled.

I freed a second body from its hook.

The monster followed it and stepped over it.

A third one hit the ground.

The dragon looked for it.

Plam. A fourth one.

The living statue searched through the whole place.

Plam. Plam. Plam.

The bastard locked its eyes on the body I was behind.

I didn’t notice that before dropping it to the floor.

A blotchy splash accompanied my body falling under the monument’s unbearable weight. The thing roared directly on my face. I distinguished in its mouth a spark trying to create fire to burn me alive.

“Leave him, or your body is gone!” Margaret yelled at her former friend from the threshold.

She was carrying, under her arm, the inert body that belongs to the soul inside the stone landmark that was ready to crush my intestines. She had a knife against Paula’s neck.

My new ally returned to save me. And now she was in a staring contest with her former friend in the form of residence building B landmark.

The monster over me placed its paw over my chest, just pressing enough to keep me in place and in the brink of fainting due to poor oxygen intake. The stone beast kept stiller than ever before, returning to what it was supposed to be, a monument.

From the dragon’s mouth, a glowing blue sphere floated in a dancing manner. It flew across the room.

Margaret didn’t let Paula’s body out of her grasp, and the dagger ready to cut its throat. The ball of Paula’s soul twinkled a little bit in front of her past partner. Margaret didn’t give in. The light descended into the lifeless body, trying to merge into it. But it couldn’t.

Paula’s human body was out of her soul’s reach. Its face turned towards the floating supernatural sphere. The body smiled in a way that seemed unnatural (even for this situation’s standards.) It crept out of Margarets hug and pushed the knife away from its throat.

“Get the dragon off him,” the dead body told its levitating soul.

Without much option, yet a lot of relentlessness, Paula’s spiritual ball returned to the statue that had been chasing us the whole day. The stiff rock-made skin and solid stone non-organs cracked as the enormous creature came back to life and stepped away from me.

My lungs finally managed to, in between a lot of coughing, get enough air to function properly.

The monster turned towards its human body that was now holding the knife. Margaret was in shock behind it.

“Come and get me,” was the last instruction Paula’s empty-eyed body commanded her.

The soul blue sphere got out from the stone dragon again and shot itself towards her old body.

Her human carcass stabbed herself in the aortic with surgical precision.

The supernatural ball of light rushed even more to get back into her own self.

A fountain of blood and Luke’s ectoplasmic form came out of Paula’s body, which plunged inert to the ground.

Margaret grabbed her friend’s soon-to-be corpse as her soul came inside it.

Margaret teared up and her voice was cutting. Paula tried to put pressure on her neck wound. Both of their reactions were futile at the end.

“I’m sorry, you left us no choice,” was Margaret’s last whisper to her old friend for (according to what she told me) probably older than they appeared.

“You betrayed our coven. You’ll pay for it.”

Paula’s last words were a threat to her partner and, until one day ago, lifetime companion. Sadly, she passed away full of rage.

Margaret broke into sobbing, squeezing Paula’s cadaver as if it was a real-sized ragdoll.

With a gesture, I indicated Luke to follow me to the back of the room, leaving Margaret a moment alone to grief. He, for once, finally understood me without a lot of explaining.

“And you were busting my balls for supposedly having killed a man?” I confronted my ghost friend with a smile, while I took down of its hook a hanging corpse. “What was that shit?”

“She was evil, beyond repair.”

We both giggled.

“Oh, says the torn apart ectoplasmic man.”

I contained my laughter. Luke didn’t.

I dropped another nude dead man from its place and the hoes stopped sucking his soul.

“Hey, since when can you affect the physical world?”

“I had a lot of time to practice,” was Luke’s only explanation.

I kept on freeing the carcasses from their place until there was no one missing and the floor ended up covered in bare human remains, empty weaving hoes and an overall sense of evilness.

***

After what felt like an eternity for Luke and me, Margaret finished grieving.

“I’m sorry about her,” I told her while looking down into dead genitalia. “Luke’s sorry too.”

I pointed with my head towards our invisible undead aider.

Margaret smiled at Luke, or an empty space for her. Before turning back to me.

“I know. She lost it,” was her calming phrase for us.

Without the stairways, it was hard to get back upstairs into the wrecked supermarket, but in between pushing, pulling and phantom physical intervention, we made it out. The sun was high. It entered through the main glass doors, the irregular ventilation-friendly skylight that won’t protect the place from rain anymore, and the brand-new monster-smashed emergency exit in the east wall.

“So how is it that if that soul-harvesting compound downstairs kept this place looking perfect, all of the food in this supermarket was spoilt?”

My curiosity got better of me. Margaret didn’t take it personally and answered my inquiry.

“When you conduct such a big and evil enterprise, there’s always some leftover that slips in between your finger. In the movie theater was the trapped guy and projection booth itself. Here were the products.”

Margaret talked as if all of this was just basic chemistry.

“So then, with this also gone, Mrs. Rowen can’t keep on living forever as her own descendant, right?”

“You know about that?” Margaret was genuinely surprised.

“William figured it out.”

“Yeah. She might have a hard time with that and other things. But she is still very dangerous.”

We stepped close to the main automatic sliding doors of the supermarket, hoping they’ll open by themselves as usual. They didn’t.

“But I’m not sure what else could have been affected,” was Margaret’s conclusion.

Luke’s immaterial self, floating to my side and refusing to phase through the main doors, glared outside in a shocking and fearful way that wasn’t reflected in his torn-up face. My glance followed Luke’s lead, and in my face that same reaction was obvious.

“I think I know,” I responded Margaret.

She looked towards the same direction we were, and, again, a swearing came out of her.

“Shit.”

On the other side of the transparent and non-working automatic doors of the rotten and moldy supermarket, Morlden Village imposed itself not as the perfect, pristine, top-notch and stereotypical Nordic old town, but as a somber and abandoned place. The grass was almost a meter high, the paint from the buildings was so scraped you could do a carbon reconstruction of its life, the sidewalks were cracked and the handrails were twisted, and the old patients with cognitive difficulties and no caregivers to help them wandered lost in this God-forgotten place.

“Shit indeed.”

Part 5 | Part 7

The three other viewers in the movie theater started screaming in absolute fear during a conversation scene in the same movie that is played every day in Morlden Village’s Movie Theater. They all shrieked at the same time, when nothing really terrifying happened on the screen. There wasn’t even any cue in the film that it was fear or something-happens-now time. It was like everyone who ever gotten to see this black and white couple drama have a very instinctive and precise instruction on where to yell.

Honestly, even I felt this supernatural urge from within to scream. I buried it under my sense of confusion as I turned to my right.

Luke, my friendly ghost, was sitting next to me and stared with the same confused look. Next to him, Mike, the mute phantom we were trying to help was nodding at us. I don’t know how, but while I was dealing with other things, Luke had figured out that Mike’s dead had something to do with this place.

“What was that?” I asked Luke through the earphone that he had learned to tap to and talk directly to me.

“Not sure.”

Behind Luke, Mike pointed towards the screen.

A metallic, shaking sound came out of the projection booth behind us. It was a faint, but distinguishable noise under the old analog projector that was louder than the sound equipment of the place.

“What was that?” I questioned myself out loud.

“Not a priority,” Luke responded.

I turned back at him. He looked towards where Mike was pointing. It wasn’t the screen, he was indicating the other three film spectators.

They, as patients of this dementia village, were old people that seemed practically unable to move and perpetually had their minds empty. They weren’t watching the screen anymore, but their blank and void eyes were fixed on me. Their boney bodies and ashy skin were clung over the fluffy chairs as chameleons ready to attack a flying bug.

I was the bug.

The three elders swirled over the seats towards me.

“Let’s go!”

I stood up and ran through my two immaterial friends that understandably weren’t as scared of their wellbeing as I was.

My arthritis hunters reached the lane where I was seated. With four limbs, they crawled towards me as if they were possessed by spiders.

The dry soda-soaked rug didn’t offer me that great friction. I slipped and my cheek smashed the never-cleaned-before ground.

An octogenary with just half his teeth jumped with unnatural force against me. He punched me directly in my nose with his almost exposed knuckles. Crack!

I kicked him away from me and against his two helpers that also wanted to get a piece of me. The body delayed them enough to grant me a couple of seconds to get up.

In my way out, I ignored the caregiver who looked after the movie theater. A very useless one if I may add, since he had done nothing when three crazy bastards shrieked as if they got stabbed.

My legs sprinted across the whole dementia village. I dodged old people walking, disregarded caregivers who wanted to know what the fuck was going on and damaged the perfect grass that covered all the parks. Behind me, the three animal-driven elders kept chasing me as if I was the juiciest treat of all time.

“Luke,” I said in between breathes, “do something!”

“Like what?!”

“Anything!”

“On it.”

Luke ectoplasmic form materialized at my side. I continued running as he directly faced the three hound grandpas. My specter aid tried standing in the middle of their way and use his limited abilities to affect the material world.

They went through him as the light distortion he is.

Thankfully, even possessed by the movie-induced killing spree, their bodies were still old. Their joints bloated, their bones and muscles stopped responding, and their lungs demanded air before producing extra lactic acid. (Who would imagine I learned something from the old medical books I read as entertainment in the Bachman Asylum?)

My chasers dropped their speed.

I didn’t. I left them behind.

***

As soon as I reached my room in residence building E, because I never got my promised room in the staff quarters, I pushed the night table against the door. I leaned all my weight against it as I collapsed exhausted. I hoped that, in the lack of any keys to lock the entrance, at least Elisa’s gremlin strategy would work as well on cinema-brainwashed old people.

Luke and Michael overcome the obstacle by phasing through the closed window of my dorm.

I closed the shades and flooded my bedroom with darkness.

“What the hell was that?” Luke asked.

Mike, without producing any sound, as he usually does, lifted his shoulders and gave us a confused face.

“We now know what killed him,” I proclaimed. “He didn’t scream while watching the movie.”

Irony is a bitch.

“My best theory,” I continued. “He came to visit a relative and got caught in the middle of this shit.”

Mike, smiling, nodded effusively at us.

“See. Mystery solved,” I told Luke.

“So why is he still here?”

“That I don’t know, it’s someone else’s time to figure out the next step.”

Luke and I glared at our mute acquaintance expecting to get some clarity in our endeavor. He stood, or levitated a little, with a blank face. Suddenly, he started to mime.

He used his hands to illustrate a box in front of him.

“A box?”

Mike simulated two big circles over the box.

“I don’t think boxes have ears,” was Luke’s useless comment.

Mike continued her act while shaking his head. He pretended to grab something with her right hand and started moving it in circles. It was as if he was winding something manually.

“The projector!” Said Luke.

Mike pointed at him exuding happiness.

“We need to get to the projection booth,” I declared.

***

As soon as night arrived, Luke, Mike and I went back to the movie theatre. It was closed, no movie was being projected and, thankfully, also there wasn’t any caregiver I needed to get through. We entered.

We first reached the screen room. It was as dark, smelly and with gooey floors as always. It’s a creepy place, even at midday and with a movie running. Right now, it seemed like it had been abandoned for years, and dust had perpetually lived in the fluffy chairs and rug surfaces. My phone flashlight didn’t help to make this more welcoming.

Mike approached a seat in the middle of the auditorium. It looked darker and stiffer than the others. I touched it. It felt like something viscous had soaked the furry couch and dried on it.

“What’s that?” Luke asked.

“I believe it’s blood,” I replied containing my gag.

Mike dropped his sight.

“I think he was murdered here.”

Luke nodded at me and approached Mike.

I continued my way to the other side of the screening room, where the stairs to the projection booth were located. I climbed them.

The projection room door was a small wooden one, bright red and fixed into place. Not even my whole weight opened it. I ran from the other side of the minuscule hall and charged against the locked way, but it didn’t move. Hurt my arm, tough.

“Go inside,” I instructed Luke and Mike behind me.

They both made a face of disgust. Sucked it up. If they wanted to figure out what we needed, they would have to cooperate.

As soon as they arrived at the door, they both stopped.

“Just phase through it,” I commanded.

“I can’t,” Luke replied.

Mike turned back and shook his head, avoiding eye contact with me.

“What the fuck you mean you can’t? You’re a ghost.”

“There is another field preventing me from entering there.”

“Shit.”

This place is full of those and it’s starting to get under my nerve.

Luke glared at me fully aware of the shitty situation we were trapped in. Mike joined the staring contest by placing his finger on his lips, demanding silence.

Luke and I were already shut, but the signal made us more aware of our surroundings.

From inside the projection booth, a low and faint moaning came out.

“What the fuck is that?”

“I guess that’s a person. In pain and weak,” Luke pointed out.

Mike started to inspect thoroughly the door. Luke and I watched him intrigued. It was like he knew exactly what he was doing. His left hand approached the locked knob. Touched it carefully, almost lovingly. He turned it with his material-less limb.

Nothing happened. He just got back defeated.

Fuck!

“Is there a single door in this place that doesn’t have an anti-ghost field?” I asked too aloud for our own good.

“Not an important one.”

I recognized that voice. Paula, the bitchy caregiver that always hears and does Mrs. Rowen desires. He was in the screening room. I could hear two people walking towards the stairs leading our way.

“Shit.”

I ran down the hallway, away from the projection booth, and took cover inside the movie theater office. Its door was thankfully open. Luke and Mike followed me through it.

It was as you’ll expect a multiplex office. A desk, a couple of lockers and three chairs. The paint was in pristine condition, the dust was non-existent and it looked like it had never been used before, but was kept inside a magic bubble that froze the room into staying new (unlike the screening room.) On the other side, there was a second exit.

I repressed my amusement of the odd situations of the room, and turned to my phantom allies.

“What are they doing here?” Luke questioned.

“I assume Mrs. Rowen send them here after us.”

Beat.

“I don’t know why, okay?” I continued. “But they can’t find me in here. I’ll need your help with that.”

Luke and Mike gave me a thrilled-less glance. I smirked.

***

The plan was simple and almost worked. The spirits tied to this reality would go out and use their limited capacity to move material objects to distract Paula and the other person with her (surely Margaret.) On the other hand, I quietly and discretely sought for the projection booth keys and expected to be able to leave through the second exit door. We got to it.

In all the drawers, lockers and even in between the neatly organized paperwork on top of the desk weren’t any kind of keys at all.

I heard a squeaky chair from the screening room rocking violently, and the steps coming my way stopped. Paula mumbled something incomprehensible to Margaret.

Clank! Clank. Clank, clank.

A metallic, violent sound rumbled through the whole place and caused momentary damage to my eardrums.

“What was that?” Paula screamed from the other side of the door.

No answer.

I grabbed the closest chair.

Paula’s steps approached the door. I did the same on my side.

The knob turned slowly.

I swallowed as I approached.

The wooden plank that divided the hallway and my refugee opened an inch to the inside.

Creak…

I ran towards it. Slammed the door closed shut. Placed the chair under the knob and pierced the shiny floor with its back legs.

“Motherfucker!” Paula shrieked at the other side of the door.

I backed a little.

Blam!

A bullet pierced through the door.

I docked instinctively.

Paula started plumbing the entryway.

I raced to the other exit. Because God heard me for once, it was unlocked. And it even led directly to a stairway that promised to be the way out.

“Stop right there!”

Margaret’s weirdly imposing voice froze me in the bottom of the steps. She looked angry, decided and no-bullshit mode. It didn’t seem like her at all. The gun in her hands was the most out-of-character for her.

“How you did it?” Margaret demanded to know.

“Margaret, what you…?”

She interrupted my attempt at dialogue.

“How did you toss the popcorn machine from the second floor?”

The thumping on the office door metronomized our dialogue interaction.

“It’s hard to explain,” I started. “I don’t think you’ll believe me.”

“Try me.”

“Please, Margaret. Let me…”

Blam!

She shot towards the ceiling and pointed back at me again.

“Shit, okay,” I continued while getting straight. “I’ll tell you.”

“Everything’s all right?” Paula voice was barely audible. “I’m going there!”

Behind Margaret, Luke and Mike appeared.

“A ghost did it.”

The ghouls approached her.

“You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

“Now!” I ordered to the phantoms whose existence was just doubted.

I didn’t know what was going to happen, but Luke and Mike seemed to have a plan. And they delivered. Each one of them poke one of their indexes inside Margarets ears. She dropped the gun and fell to the floor.

Before knowing what happened and Paula’s arrival, I escaped from the movie theater.

***

In the outside, in the middle of the cold night, Luke materialized to my side.

“What was that about?” I questioned him.

“Not exactly sure. But it turns out that being close to one another produces an electric charge.” Beat. “Where are we going?”

I kept running towards the other side of the Morlden Village.

“To the only place where they won’t think I’ll going. I need you to guide me.”

We reached the East side, where the staff quarters are located. All the buildings had the lights off.

I got closer through Mrs. Rowen’s office. My shinbone started to burn, not very intensely, but it couldn’t fail to its tradition of letting me know that I was close to that dark place.  Squatting, I crossed under the windows until I reached the main staff quarters entrance. I followed Luke inside.

No lights. Just a hallway with equal doors on both sides. A wooden floor with a couple of torn bits. The first door frame was also a bit chipped. It wouldn’t have been any noticeable at all if the rest of this dementia prison wasn’t so intact.

I desired to make Luke notice this, but I couldn’t allow myself to wake anyone up. I wasn’t strong enough.

“Luke,” I whispered.

My ghostly lead, who was not crawling through the floor as I was, turned around. His face was as neutral and expressionless as its torn-apart ectoplasmic flesh allows it. But, I have become good at reading him. He was letting me know that I was stupid.

In the small opening under the door to my left, light turned on. The little flicker that escaped from the room got blocked when something approached the entrance. Of course I had awakened a caregiver, those bastards were trained to be ready to whatever a cognitively held patient would ideate or need at the middle of the night.

I pressed myself against the wall next to the door, trying to merge with it. Luke stayed motionless in the middle of the corridor. I envied his invisibility so much at that time.

The door opened to the outside. Weird, but fortunate to me, it covered me almost completely.

My breathing paused itself. My muscles strained themselves to keep the position, even when it will later cause me cramps.

Luke stared directly at a caregiver who rapidly and poorly “made sure no one was there,” before going back to bed.

The door closed, leaving me without cover. My normal physical functions returned. Luke gave me a deadly glare. I smiled and, without producing any sound, gesticulated a single word for him to read in my lips: “sorry.”

Snoring emerged from the caregiver’s room. Luke turned and continued walking…? Well, floating to the end of the corridor. I followed him as quietly as possible.

In the end, there were three doors. The one perpendicular to the hallway was transparent and connected it with Mrs. Rowen’s office, which caused the slightest pinch on my shin I had ever experienced. And two dorm doors were facing each other.

Luke flew through the left one. After making sure nobody was watching me and that the floor wouldn’t crack or squeak as I stood up, I got inside that room.

Now, this was a lived bedroom. The bed sheets were uneven, the small table wasn’t completely parallel to the wall, and the chair even had a shirt over it. Why or how do the caregiver’s rooms look so normal when the rest of the place looks like an old Nordic village theme park where everything is taken care of with Disney-level intensity?

I took my phone out of my pocket. I made sure the brightness was as low as possible and my typing wouldn’t have sounded.

“Margaret’s.” I showed the written message to Luke.

Luke nodded and pointed to the bed. I nodded back.

I lay on the floor next to the bed, doing the slowest, most careful and quietest pushup ever. Turned my mobile’s flashlight on, pointing it towards the floor, hoping to keep the light to a minimum. When I pointed it under the bed, I found what I was looking for.

I extended my free arm and blindly searched for it. The first thing my fingers felt was a hard and smooth surface. I tried grabbing it. My digits then encounter a hairy and oozy thing connected. I snatched the witch totem from under Margaret’s bed.

Then, Luke and I left the staff quarters. The same process, just in reverse and without waking anyone this time.

Outside, under the moonlight that shone over one park, Mike joined us. He was trying to communicate something to us, but got distracted while looking at the totem. Honestly, both Luke and I were already too mesmerized with it to be paying any attention to Mike’s warning. Big mistake.

The witch totem was this weird, amorphic structure made of animal bones, possibly human hair and a sticky substance that, if my knowledge about witches is correct, would have been a mixture of body fluids. A small rodent’s lower jaw functioned as the base of a demonic polygon.

“You think it will work?”

“We can just hope,” I replied to my ghost ally.

I threw the handicraft into the ground. In its sturdiness, it bounced a little but didn’t suffer any damage.

Containing my disappointment, I stepped on it.

Crack.

That faint sound of little bones breaking snapped us out of our trance completely.

Mike started pointing desperately towards the west side of the park. Luke abided.

I kicked the destroyed totem as hard as I could. The pieces, still tied together, flew a couple of yards. The thing fell in the one-foot-deep false river of the park. Hole in one.

“You may want to take a look at this,” Luke hijacked my attention.

From the west, the three elders that had viewed the film with me earlier that day swirled at full speed towards us. Their clear empty eyes were still latched on me.

“Give me a break,” I said to leave out the negative energy building inside me because of my luck.

I fled to the East, again.

***

I intruded into the village’s unlocked and tidy shed, and took cover in a shadowy corner.

The three crazy octogenarians busted into the place. Their weak bodies against the doors made the whole place shook a little. They separated to look for me.

I walked slowly through the interior perimeter of the building, hoping the scarce light would cover me enough to get to the other side and leave.

The three hunters, even with arthritis and damaged discs, were acting like hounds. They walked in four limbs, their noses flinched constantly trying to find some smell and their eyes were completely devoid of humanity behind them. It was like being stalked by demonic therians.

I managed to avoid them. Just a couple of feet more to the exit. Accidentally, I pushed over some metallic shovel or something.

Clank!

The three elders’ senses turned to me.

I grabbed the rope that was just in front of me.

They leaped towards me like furious wolves.

I tied the rope to a column.

One got on top of me. I fell.

I knew her. She lived in my same residence building. It was Mrs. Welch.

Even with her new agility, she was still weak as an old woman who is used to having everything done for her. I pushed her chest to get her at arm’s length. Then, I snarled her neck with the lose end of the rope.

I pulled.

She got tossed away from me, having a hard time breathing.

As an old guy jumped at me. I rolled in the ground, managing to catch him inside the rope.

Mrs. Welch and my second attacker got pulled against the column.

The third attacker waited at some distance, evaluating the situation. That gave me time to make sure I was pulling the rope hard enough.

I ran towards the teethless remaining chaser. He assaulted me. I dodged it in the last second. Two uncut nails sharp as talons scratched my forehead. I screamed as I turned back. The cable pushed the bastard.

I slid under the rope directly tied to the pillar.

The crazy old man shrieked when the air of his lungs went out thanks to the cord on his diaphragm.

I yanked.

The lace tightened and the fucker joined his two companions in the building’s support.

I made sure to secure the end of the line before approaching.

Mrs. Welch and her two homicidal friends were uselessly still fighting, trying to free themselves from the thick industrial rope. (It’s surprising what you can find here.) They physically looked pretty much like themselves, or at least Mrs. Welch did, but none of them had any personality. They were creatures driven by pure bloodlust that kept on harming themselves when trying to get out.

“Mrs. Welch, can you hear me?” Was my communication attempt.

What once was Mrs. Welch grunted at me as she asphyxiated herself more with the cord around her neck. Another elder was almost collapsing his ribcage, and the third one surely had damaged some internal organ by now.

I backed a little. The first sunrays of the morning penetrated through the entrance. I placed my supernatural vibrating earphone in my ear.

“What’s up Luke?” I answered his call.

“You’ll want to go back to the theater.”

“I seriously doubt it.”

***

A couple of minutes later, I was back outside the movie theater which only movie turned cognitive damaged patients into crazy quadrupeds. Mike and Luke were by my side.

“So, you find a way to get in?” I asked them.

“Yes,” Margaret’s voice came from a bush nearby.

She revealed herself and walked towards me. I’m not sure if she can see the ghosts by my side, but if that was the case, she pretended to be uncapable of it very convincingly.

“Found the key,” Margaret continued.

“What…?”

“Was in Mrs. Rowen’s office,” she interrupted me. “I’m pretty sure it is the one for the projection booth.”

She handed me the key.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I just know something bad is happening here. Go, now. I’ll make sure to get Paula away.”

I held the keys in my hand as she walked away.

My two undead allies nodded at me. We three break into the fucking theater.

***

It was way too early still to have encountered a caregiver, so we managed to cross the screening auditorium and go up into the second story hallway without any obstacle. From outside of the projection booth, we could now hear clearly and louder the moaning again.

“Are you sure we want to do this?” I asked my companions with the last drop of sanity before doing something stupid and opening Pandora’s box.

Mike nodded firmly, but cautiously.

“Just do it,” Luke told me.

Shit. I approached the door. Got the keys into the locked doorknob and turned them. I pushed open the bright red wooden obstacle to discover the source of the moaning: A barely alive, malnourished guy was tied to a chair.

The man’s head was strapped into place, forcing him to keep staring out through the projection window into the screen. His eyes were forced open by some odd tweezers that were piercing his skull, which had caused his eyeballs to become some burned insect-like, popping-out protuberances. His nails were so long they twisted around themselves, having morphed from sharp spurs into frail and impractical keratin constructions. His mouth was hanging open, without muscles to keep it shut anymore. His almost transparent skin made him look like a fucking digestive system diagram in which you could see movement in real time. A thousand of inch-thick belts prohibited him from any movement, forcing him to stay in that seated position.

I almost vomited my last meal (from almost twenty hours ago.) Luke rejected the image and for once felt thankful regarding her simply torn-apart and barely recognizable ghost form. Mike’s reaction was the surprising one; he kept looking at the once-human creature with a mixture of cuteness and horror in equal parts. Then he proceeded to make some movement with his hands.

The monster tied up to the chair groaned to us.

From out of his mouth, as if that nature’s mistake was vomiting, ectoplasmic-looking spheres came flying out of his mouth. Those light blue balls danced a little in the air, before being shot to the East by some paranormal force.

“Shit,” was Luke’s reaction to that gross thing we just witnessed.

“Help… please,” was the barely audible words that came out of the immobilized man.

The ancient projector to the left of this old man started rumbling. A faint light came out of it and started becoming more intense with every twinkle.

I entered the small room. Mike and Luke followed me.

They tried to contact the poor trapped bastard, while I failed to knock down the hot machine that was rolling twenty-four frames per second. It was a very heavy piece of machinery that felt like welded to the ground below.

Whispers and mumblings came from outside, in the screening room. Old patients from this place were taken their seats on the auditorium chairs. Two voices were clearer and louder than the others, Paula and Margaret.

“Told you it was here,” Paula recriminated her companion.

“I swear I thought I heard him say he planned to Mrs. Rowen’s office,” Margaret defended herself.

I kept pushing my whole weight with the small momentum I could get in the miniscule projection booth against the noisy analog device. It wasn’t even rocking lightly. A bright light was shot from the projector, flew through the window and took the form of a giant couple in the screen.

“That’s the scene!” Luke commented in an almost rhetorical manner.

“I know! Can you help me with this?”

“He’s upstairs!” Paula yelled to Margaret from the main room.

“Stop,” Margaret indicated her. “I cannot keep doing this. And I can’t let you.

I stopped pushing the projector that was not going to move everywhere. Sought through the small booth for anything that could even help me to break the lenses. Mike was voguing with his hands in front of the imprisoned man attempting to tell him something in sign language.

From the screening room, the yells of Paula and Margaret became more intense. I took a small glimpse from the projection window.

They were fighting physically in front of the screen. Punches and kicks were marking the rhythm of their verbal and argumentative battle.

“I told our master since the beginning that you were weak,” was Paula’s attack to her friend.

“Empathy and selflessness aren’t weakness.”

“It is in this line of job.”

“I never signed for this.”

Then I recognized the moment in the scene of the film. There was a subtle monologue, so hidden that I can’t be sure it wasn’t a product of my imagination. It sounded like a prayer. In case it was, it was in a language I didn’t recognize. The voice was very similar to that of Mrs. Rowen.

“Luke, take the sound down!” I ordered my spirit friend.

“How?”

“Any way you can!”

Luke flew out of the projection booth. Mike kept moving his arms, but the man trapped in front of him wasn’t paying him any attention, his mouth started opening wide. Having failed to find anything to bust the projector, I did what I could to block the light: I placed myself in front of the scorching light.

I saw the screening room below. My body covered most of the image.

“He’s there,” Paula yelled at Margaret while pointing at me.

My back began to burn. It felt like my clothes were bursting into flames and merging with my skin.

Sound kept rolling.

Paula ran towards the stairs that led to where I was. Margaret snatched her hair.

All the elders downstairs yelled like possessed.

I contained my urge to scream.

The pain from Paula’s yanked hair made her shriek.

Fuck.

Out of every elder and Paula’s mouths, a small floating orb of translucent blue light elevated high. An invisible force pulled them towards me.

I got out of the way, letting the projector continue its job and giving my back a break. (Hope Carly has some ridiculously strong ointment.)

The mystic balls shoved themselves into the trapped man’s mouth. With the tiny amount of air his atrophied lungs were able to contain and expel, he yelled.

“What’s happening?” Luke asked the moment he came inside.

“I don’t fucking know,” I replied.

I walked towards the projection booth door and closed it.

“Why’s that for?”

“I’m pretty sure those irrational bastards are going to come for us.”

As if I had invoked it, the elders from the screening room and Paula, all without life behind their eyes and fueled purely on animalistic instinct, crawled up the stairs to our fort.

“Margaret, buy us some time,” I screamed to my new ally from the projection window.

“How?” She yelled back at me.

I let her figure that out on her own. I’m tired of having to do everything.

“Okay, how we stop this screaming fucker?” I asked Luke and Mike hoping at least anyone had an answer.

The only sound was the grunts from outside and the piercing high-pitch cry of the bastard.

“Here goes nothing,” I let my friends from beyond the grave know.

I punched the motherfucker directly in the face. A little blood spilled out. The yell was still coming out of his damaged throat.

“What was that?!” Luke finally intervened.

“Do you had any better ideas?”

Mike flapped his hands.

“Empathy,” Luke translated.

I didn’t stop to question how he knew what that meant. I got caught in the middle of an idea. I positioned myself to the right of the strapped man. I did my best to get my head and eyes to the same height as his, and stared at what he was forced to watch permanently.

There was something. I recognized it. In the reflection of the glass window of the projection room, I distinguished Mrs. Rowen staring directly at us (well, mainly at the trapped guy), while holding a knife and smiling in a threatful way.

“Fuck,” got out of me as a powerful blow knocked on the door.

I crawled on the floor and let my weight fall against the red wood, hoping it would be enough to keep a couple of possessed octogenarians outside.

“In the projection window,” I informed my allies trapped in the living’s world. “There is a reflection of Mrs. Rowen.”

Mike stared at me with his brains spinning a thousand revolutions per second.

“He has to watch that all the time,” Luke continued my idea.

“Probably she was the one who got him here.”

“He’s scared,” Luke concluded.

A blasting force pushed the door behind me. My burnt back threw a throbbing pain through all my nerves.

Mike approached the poor bastard.

I kept holding the door.

“Whatever you’re doing, do it now!” I indicated both ghosts.

Mike lifted his index finger and placed it over the immobilized man’s lips, signaling silence.

His deteriorated, and surprisingly still-working, vocal cords kept the shriek coming out.

Luke approached, touched the guy’s shoulder and talked to him in a very peaceful voice that I don’t know where he got it from.

“Calm down. She has no longer control over you.”

The protuberances that once were eyes lowered just enough to focus on Mike in front of him.

Mike smirked at him with a ridiculously empathetic smile for the situation.

“She no longer has control over me,” the tied guy whispered in a way I could only heard half his words.

He gaged and all the spheres of light were expelled from him. They floated a little in front of us, before going through the door I was holding shut.

The blowing from the other side stopped. No more pushing nor yanking. Confused elders’ voice was the only thing on the other side.

The projector cranked a little before its light exploded in an energy overcharge. It stopped rolling.

The poor motherfucker that had been strapped to the chair for decades (my educated guess,) disintegrated into dust like if Thanos had snapped his fingers. On his place, just an ectoplasmic body remained.

The newly born ghost finally stood up and stretched his muscle-less legs. He grabbed Mike’s immaterial hand and shook it a little. He gave at look at me, still suffering on the floor, and nodded in a thankful manner. Then he turned towards Luke and did the same. My old friend and I nodded at him in return.

The freshly out of his body specter looked back at Mike, and signed as he whispered the meaning.

“Thank you, son. Let’s go.”

Our mute ghost friend that we named Mike and the surprisingly sane-enough-for-communication trapped bastard disappeared peacefully into light.

Luke and I kept staring at each other.

“How’s your back?”

“I’d like to be death now,” I replied to him still on the floor.

“Don’t be such a pussy.”

I smiled at my supernatural sidekick.

In between the incoherent mumbles of the elders outside, I noticed someone knocking on the door. It was too strong to have been one of them.

“Are you still in there?” Margaret’s voice came from the other side.

I opened the door for her while I caressed my hurt back.

“Kind of…”

Her mouth and eyes wide signaled trouble. It was serious.

“Paula didn’t wake up.”

“What you mean? All the blue balls were released,” Luke pointed out.

Still don’t know if Margaret recognized my undead pal. I’m inclined to believe she doesn’t.

“Her soul past pass her body and went out,” Margaret clarified.

“So those things don’t go back to their bodies?” I asked her.

“The others did. But she knows how to control her body-free soul.”

“Why does she know how to do that?” Luke questioned.

“Where can a missing soul go?” Was my attempt at a more sensible interrogation.

Margaret was about to answer when a sound from the outside interrupted our dialogue. A deep, unhinged roar rumbled our hideout.

“Fuck.”

Part 4 | Part 6

Next morning started with a somber ritual: a burial. It was Mr. Bohr’s, one of my fellow residents that lived with me on Building E. He died during the night from natural causes.

I had opposing feelings during the ceremony. The words said by a religious resident were mostly nonsensical, but the parts that were coherent effectively made me miss the old guy who played cards with the caregivers every day and screamed constantly. Yet, I couldn’t shake out of my head the fact that William didn’t receive a service like this. Even worse, Mrs. Rowen pretended as if she didn’t know who I was talking about.

The morning was cold, windy and a couple of minutes after the casket was put under the ground, which remained closed during the whole procedure, a lighting assaulted Morlden “Dementia” Village. This change in the weather and the cognitive detriment of the residents made sure that the graveyard was emptied in twenty seconds, with everyone continuing their lives as if nothing had happened and completely ignoring that a couple of them were brought to tears because of Mr. Bohr’s loss.

The idea of him just being forgotten so quickly by the whole community around him caused me an uncontrollable feeling of emptiness. I had never stopped to think about this aspect of a place like this. In theory it is pretty cool for cognitive held patients to live in a society tailored especially for them, but nobody talks about how fragile it is because the people in it cannot strength it.

I was left alone with my thoughts in the middle of the cemetery. Reaching my pocket, I took out the earphone I had just retrieved from the colony of stealing goblins that existed below this place and put it on my right ear.

“Luke,” I said with a low volume and hoping to not even get an answer. “Can you hear me?”

The device shrieked directly in my eardrum, almost drilling through it with its tiny sound waves. I repressed my instinct to throw it away.

“Yes,” Luke responded with a single cold word through the earphone that we had learned to master as a direct ghost-human communication system.

“I know you’ll get a little upset, but I really need your help with something.”

“Not really,” Luke’s voice sounded so calmed that threw me out of balance regarding my expectations. “It got me very upset.”

“I’m sorry, I know. But I need your help. William seems to…”

“Of course it’s William!” He interrupted me. “When it’s about him you are always ready to tackle it first, donate blood to him and you didn’t abandon him on its own when he was trying to find out why he ended here.”

He wasn’t entirely wrong.

“It’s not like that,” I assured him as convinced as I could. “He’s in trouble…”

“Mike’s also in trouble, since a lot of time ago.”

“The mute ghost?”

“I told you he needed help, but you refused to help us.”

“I accept my fault for that,” I said entirely meaning it. “After we help William, we take care of Mike’s situation.” I started speaking as fast as I could. “I owe him that, he sacrificed…”

“You’re such an asshole!”

I wasn’t fast enough. Luke disappeared before I could defend my case.

The rain stopped.

***

Just outside of the graveyard’s entry gates I was intercepted by an old woman. I knew her. She was the first resident I met, walking along the main avenue of this place in the middle of the cold night when I arrived here. I had heard her name before, Elisa.

I wasn’t in a chatting mood, but she was not leaving her prey easily.

“What happened?” She threw the bait. “You look upset, darling.”

I ignored her and continued walking.

She didn’t yield and, even with his limited movement and weak lungs, tried to keep up with me.

“Please, you seem troubled.”

“You wouldn’t understand it,” I replied without interrupting my way back to residence building E.

“Try me,” she said before quitting her pursue. “I’m very good with supernatural issues.”

Fuck.

My legs froze in place.

I turned and stared directly at the old, melting face of the lady that had been following me. She kept her glare in my eyes, and a sweet caring smile appeared in the middle of all her wrinkles. Chilling wind blew between us, difficulting the flow of our conversation through the cold atmosphere.

I approached her.

“What did you just say?” I questioned her.

“I have experience with supernatural issues,” she repeated crystal clear. “Let me help you.”

“How?”

Her grin grew.

“First I need my ring back.”

***

I couldn’t believe I had agreed to help her get her ring back. But, obviously, she knew what she was talking about, and that was something new in this place. Yet, I didn’t expect it to be such a hard thing to retrieve.

It turned out that the theft-prone goblins had taken it from her almost forty years ago, when she had just entered here. This posed more questions. How did she know about the creatures that live under her? She didn’t look older than eighty, so she probably became a patient here while in her late thirties. I decided to ask her those questions after I found my way out of the underground cave systems.

The plan had worked so far. She distracted the caregiver of her residence building A, while I swirled down his bed into the tunnels that the critters used to steal shinny objects. I crawled for a while before reaching the main cavern of the system.

The place where a couple of nights before a magnificent structure of glowing and reflective scraps imposed magnificently, now the whole floor was covered under two-inch layer of trash that had fallen from the mountain the gremlins considered a sacred landmark. It was me who caused the avalanche by retrieving my supernatural communication earphone that worked as an angular stone of the structure. But I didn’t regret doing it. Those fuckers had it coming.

What I do regret was that now I had to find a small ring in the abysmal ocean of stolen things. With the light of my phone, I inspected the whole place. Not a single cup remained unturned and all metallic utensils were tossed aside. A couple of hours later, accompanied by a pair of scratches and falls, I found what I was looking for.

I held in between my fingers a small golden ring. It clearly belonged to a person with tiny fingers. It was simple, not engraved and flourishless. It was just a simple golden ring with a red shinny rock on top carved as a D-8 dice. The jewel on top didn’t look like something I had ever seen before (not that I’m an expert), it appeared to be constantly melting.

Upon my return to residence building A through the tunnel, I knocked on the base of the caregiver’s bed.

The caregiver lifted the furniture that blocked my exit and helped me out of there. He asked me how I got there. I pretended to have dementia and that was enough for him. He left me alone.

I entered Elisa’s room. Have you ever gone to an elder’s room? Perhaps your grandmother? That’s exactly how Elisa’s room looked and felt like.

“I found it,” I informed my new associate.

She extended her hands towards me.

“Before, I have a couple of questions.”

Under that condition, she complied. The interview started.

“Why you ended here?” I asked.

“I was following a trace of my missing… mother all the way to here.”

That pause was creepy. She was lying. I indulged her.

“You found her?”

“No”

“How you know about the snatching goblins?”

“I’ve been trapped here for a long time. I learned to survive.”

“Survive?” I was getting lost.

“If you block your room’s door with a heavy furniture, they couldn’t come in to steal your stuff.”

“You seem very conscious and well held up there to be interned on a dementia village…” I told her, pointing at her head.

“That makes two of us.”

Her answer completely disarmed me. I gave her the ring expecting nothing to happen and all this to had been just a waste of time.

She snatched it out of my palm and placed it in her left ring finger.

The second the piece of jewelry touched her interdigital clefts (the connective skin between fingers), it glowed like it was a red star. It started accumulating a lot of light energy. Beans of light and projections of unknown graphs flew out of the weird looking rock. All the energy exploded in a shockwave of pure energy.

“What the fuck was that?” I asked after my eyes regained their ability to see.

The old lady in front of me looked different. I mean, she still had the same appearance as a wrinkled and fragile woman, but her body language was the one of a stronger person. She stood straight with her lump having disappeared. Even her voice was more powerful, like if her vocal cords were restored to new and her lungs were getting enough air at last.

“We don’t have much time before she notices something’s wrong,” she told me. “We need the key to your room.

***

We went to my room immediately. This time, I was having to walk fast just to keep up with the rejuvenated and strength-restored lady. We almost sprinted in the little inclinations of the park.

“So why do we need the key?” I questioned with the little air I wasn’t using to propel my body at her speed.

“It was given to you by Mrs. Rowen when you first arrived, right? In the main gates?”

I produced an affirmative noise.

“Then it is connected on a metaphysical way to the exit.”

She was crazy. But at that point, I didn’t dare to contradict her. I was way over my league.

We reached residence building E. Got inside my room and, from a drawer, I took a key attached to a giant blue acrylic plate with the number 5, which worked as the most impractical keychain ever. I was a little reluctant to give it to her, even when I didn’t care about it and it wasn’t as if it could be used to close the room from the inside, but I had just retrieved it a couple of nights ago. I ignored my irrational feelings.

Elisa grabbed it and placed it over her palm. She did a weird hand dance and the fucking thing started floating in front of her.

I’m already kind of used to this supernatural shit.

She started mumbling incomprehensible gibberish.

“Wait,” I interrupted her prayer.

She stared at me.

“You said that thing is connected to things it was close to, right?”

My new ally didn’t nod, but her eyes answered positively for her.

“Then it must be connected to William,” I assured based on a very limited magical knowledge. “He was a caregiver in this place.”

“Yes…” the magical old woman responded me with doubt. “But if I used this thing to track him, I’ll load it towards him.”

“And then you’ll not be able to track a way out of here,” I finished her idea.

She nodded at me with fear of my next words.

“Doesn’t matter,” I replied. “I owe him.”

She smiled with a mixture of contempt and frustration. Her hands kept on twisting around the levitating key. Her spell didn’t become more decipherable.

Once she finished her ritual, the key started floating out of her reach. Slowly, it waved through the air as it approached the window of my room that faced the interior of this village.

“Follow it,” the old lady instructed me as she leaped through my window with an agility that I didn’t even have in my prime physical years.

I trailed her as fast as my body handled.

The key floated all the way through the parks and streets of the Morlden Village. Residents and caregivers watched the scene with different reactions, disinterest and disbelief, respectively.

The magically charged thing led us all the way to the supermarket. We crossed the moldy bread aisle before reaching the storage area, which was behind a door disguised as part of the wall. Tumbling, as if it was actually stepping on each step, the key continued its path down to a sort of basement.

It was a closed and claustrophobic space. Black and grey were the only colors that were badly illuminated through sixty-year-old light bulbs that stayed more time off than on during their twinkling. Metal grinds under our steps creaked in a symphony with the rumbling pipes that cross the ceiling over our heads.

The key followed the creepy hall to its end. A metallic door, clean as if it was the only thing here taken care of in the last century, blocked the key’s way. The moment our magical compass touched the pristine door, it dropped to the ground without any warning.

I tried pushing open the big handle. Its temperature indicated to me that at the other side of our obstacle was a cold room. The monolithic blockage didn’t move, not even shook.

I glared at my partner in crime.

“I can’t open it with magic,” she responded my unasked question (maybe she was also a telepath). “That room is protected by a very ancient and powerful enchantment.”

Fuck. This will need a more… hands on approach.

“I have an idea, wait for me here,” I commanded.

***

I ran into the shed. As there was no need for it to be kept blocked anymore, it was just closed with a manual lock against cognitive held patients. Thankfully, I wasn’t one of them.

The place was surprisingly clean now. All the dust was gone, the light bulb was changed for a state-of-the-art LED one that prevented any shadow, and the unorganized tools and supplies were now marked and following a thematic order. It was supernaturally clean. Even if all the staff had been 24/7 cleaning this place, there was no way it ended up looking like this.

For my good luck, this new organized shed made it easy, almost intuitive, to find the Halligan bar I was looking for. The moment I touched it, the shed doors slammed shut behind me.

Fuck. This was just a waste of time.

I placed the tool in the gap between both doors.

The wood squeaked a little.

I pushed.

Doors held their position.

Placed my whole body into the task.

Doors gave in as if they weren’t even locked in the first place.

My shoulder hit the ground.

“Mrs. Rowen wants to talk to you,” Margaret told me after kneeling beside me.

“But…”

“No buts,” Paula closed the dialogue.

***

“Why were you in the shed?” Mrs. Rowen asked me once I was sitting in front of her desk in her office.

I regained my orientation. The same office as always. Mrs. Rowen accused me of some shit. The big ass safe box behind her. The missing picture of her, my grandma and three more women, all of them looking very familiar.

“I needed the bar to open the cold room in the supermarket.”

There was no need to hide my intentions. It actually paid off, as Mrs. Rowen failed at dissimulating her surprise. I had her well-studied.

“What you…”

“I know you keep William there,” I interrupted her.

“How?”

“Magic,” I answered her with the truth in a sarcastic manner.

That was my mistake.

Mrs. Rowen pressed the call button for Paula and Margaret, and ordered them to bring Elisa from residence building A.

I swallowed and did my best attempt at a poker face. Mrs. Rowen and I kept on staring at each other in silence for what was like five minutes, but felt like hours.

Elisa was brought by Paula and Margaret into the room. She looked as old and tired as she did before she wore the ring. Her lump stood in the way of her sitting properly and her arthritis hands trembled like an electric mixer. She wasn’t wearing any jewelry.

“Why you brought me here?” Elisa asked with what felt like genuine curiosity.

“How are you, Elisa?” Mrs. Rowen asked her with a sweet voice I hadn’t heard in a long time. “Everything has been okay?”

I stared at the scene in a confused silence.

“I’m hungry,” Elisa replied. “When are we going to eat?”

She looked at me waiting for an answer.

Mrs. Rowen examined the scene.

“Not know,” I replied. “I’m not your caregiver.”

“What’s a caregiver?” Elisa wasn’t over with her Jeopardy round.

“Don’t worry about that,” Mrs. Rowen indicated.

The manager pushed the call button inside her desk drawer.

“Who are you?” Elisa yelled at me.

The loud noise startled both Mrs. Rowen and me, she even left the drawer slightly open.

“No one important,” replied Mrs. Rowen standing up.

Paula and Margaret arrived again.

“Excuse me,” I pretended to be indignant instead of lost.

“Get Mrs. Elisa to her room,” the leader of Morlden Village ordered her henchwomen. “And make sure she gets something to eat.”

“What are we going to eat?”

Elisa’s outrage got calm once Paula and Margaret grabbed her from both arms and led her out of the office.

“Calm down,” Margaret did her part as the good cop of the pair.

They left the room and left me alone with Mrs. Rowen. The staring contest continued a little.

Mrs. Rowen, already standing up, quickly followed the leaving party, as if she just remembered something to tell them. She stepped out into her office lobby.

“Wait,” I barely heard her. “One more thing.”

Swiftly, I got to the other side of the desk.

“Elisa,” Mrs. Rowen continued talking. “How are your sisters?”

I opened the badly closed drawer, which meant I didn’t require a key to get to the inside of it.

“Who is my dear sister?” Elisa asked in a voice so low I am completing what I believe she said. “What’s your last name?”

I snatched a big key chain from the drawer.

“Forget it,” Mrs. Rowen indicated.

I stashed my loot on my pocket.

Steps approached the office.

I closed the drawer completely.

“What are you doing?” Mrs. Rowen demanded to know.

“Just looking this metal safe,” I answered without turning back at her. “What you keep inside.”

“None of your business.”

She approached me.

I faced her.

Her eyes analyzed me thoroughly to get any clue of what I was doing.

I didn’t yield.

Neither did my opponent.

I took a leap of faith.

“I suffer from cognitive detriment, you know?” I asked her as I faked an almost parodically confused smirk.

“Just get out,” she ordered me.

I left.

***

Like half an hour later, I went to Elisa’s room.

She was waiting, thinking in her bed. The ring was on her finger. Her life force and young energy had returned to her.

“Oh, that was such a good performance!”

I lifted my hand hoping she would hi-fived my celebration.

She did it with no energy. As if she hadn’t returned to her strengthened magical self.

“What’s going on?” I asked her.

“I wouldn’t be able to open the door,” she replied with her head low, as if she was a kid being punished. “I’m sorry.”

Her reaction threw me out of balance for a moment, psychologically speaking.

“Don’t worry about that.”

She lifted her eyes to meet my friendly smile.

“We don’t need magic to enter,” I concluded my pep talk while holding the keychain I had stolen on my hand.

Elisa smiled back at me.

***

We returned as fast as possible to the cold room door in the basement of the supermarket. It was exactly as we left it an hour or so ago.

“Ready?” I asked her while holding in my hand the key that finally got in the door lock.

She nodded. Her body language showed concentration.

I got into the same mindset. Turned the key.

The cold room, as its name implies, was freezing, even for the standards of this Nordic village. There were packages of fruit, vegetables and meat so old that, even in a bellow 0° environment, were rotten and stank foul. Yet, the worst part was the center where complete animals were hanged up from the ceiling, with the minor fact that these animals were humans.

Elisa and I contained our impulse to gag and vomit. The multisensorial experience made it hard to pull that off.

“Oh, fuck,” Elisa broke the silence and her, until now, very polite use of the language. “This is a draining farm.”

I’m not completely sure what she meant exactly by that, but it was true. All the hanged bodies were connected through small hoses and catheters full of a weird smoke-like fluid that was being sucked out of the corpses.

“What are those things?” I asked Elisa.

While walking through the human flesh-made maze, I encountered myself with Mr. Bohr’s carcass. It looked dead, of course, but in amazing shape in comparison to the rest of cadavers. Something clicked inside my head: the coffin was empty the whole time.

“I think Mrs. Rowen found a way of extracting life force out of the dead.” Elisa answered in a vague manner that appeared to be going to be developed further, but she got interrupted.

“And you shouldn’t be aware of this,” Paula’s voice, which I had learned to hate, echoed inside the room.

“Please just come out,” Margaret added a little calm to the situation.

I hadn’t stopped searching for what we came here in the first time. It paid off once I encountered a dismembered corpse held up together with staples and twisted wires. It was an exploded body mediocrely frankensteined into a humanoid thing that, with enough luck, could be hanged as a skinned animal. It was William.

“Wait!” I screamed from the other side of the draining corpses.

I approached back to the entry, where Paula and Margaret waited for me.

Elisa, more frightened than me, also came out of her hiding cautiously.

“We’ll have to see what Mrs. Rowen decides to do with you two, sneaky bastards.”

“C’mon, Paula, Margaret,” I appealed to diplomacy, “you can’t be on board with this shit.”

Elisa lifted her hands at her chest height, and started micro moving them, barely discernable.

“It’s not fair for this people, some of them were even friends of yours,” I continued.

Margaret turned her eyes to Paula.

“Paula, perhaps he’s right,” Margaret told her friend.

“Don’t think so,” Paula responded as cold as the room without making eye contact with Margaret.

“Just…”

“You shut up!” Paula interfered with my futile attempt of providing arguments in my defense.

“Seriously, this was what we want?” Margaret questioned her partner.

Paula finally took her eyes off Elisa and me to focus them on her regretful companion.

“We know it won’t be easy.”

On my right, Elisa’s lips danced as if she was whispering a prayer.

“We knew that remaining young would require sacrifices,” Paula concluded.

“But this is inhuman. Not even dead we grant our friends peace,” Margaret protested.

Whatever Elisa was doing, I hoped it would be fast.

“And we will not find peace if we don’t do what Mrs. Rowen ask from us!” Paula’s frustration yell hurt all the eardrums that heard her. She turned back to me. “Now, you two are coming with us.”

Elisa said out loud a phrase that seemed like a mixture of Latin and her own made out dialect. A reddish shockwave flew out of her hands.

It travelled at the speed of sound.

Before Paula or Margaret could do something about it, they received the magical impact. They were thrown a couple of feet back and slammed against the ground unconscious.

“What was that?” I asked my very powerful ally.

“A forgetting spell, they’ll wake up in a couple of hours without remembering this.”

“You’re amazing,” I told her.

Elisa smiled.

“I need your help,” I started the weirdest solid I was ever going to ask. “Can you help get William down?”

He… (it?) was where I left him. At the other end of the room, William’s reconstructed corpse was hanged, and a dozen metaphysical catheters poked his skin.

“First, we take him down,” Elisa instructed me. “Once we remove the hose, Mrs. Rowen will notice it.”

I grabbed the barely discernable cadaver from the legs and lifted him up. Elisa understood my intention, and with a second to spare, attempted to take out the big hook that was keeping my past-away friend floating above the ground.

“So, what’s Mrs. Rowen doing to them?” I asked trying to avoid inhaling the stench.

I felt something rolling down my left arm.

“She has always tried to keep herself young…” Elisa started answering my question at the same time she continued her endeavor.

I lowered my sight to the floor.

“… Magical extraction has always been the best choice.”

She unhooked my friend.

In the dirty tiles below the corpse, A catheter was leaking out the half-sucked substance.

“Fuck,” I mumbled.

“Indeed,” Elisa answered. “It’s a pretty foul thing to do…”

“A catheter fell out!” I interrupted her.

“Shit!”

Carrying the wire-held cargo, we ran towards the exit. Elisa, even with her old appearance, was strong and helped with a load I wouldn’t have managed it on my own.

While crossing through the entrance, I dropped the stolen keys I had used to get us in. They landed in between Paula and Margaret’s sleeping bodies. Bullseye!

***

Elisa and I transported the corpse over our shoulders all the way to the graveyard. We did encounter more residents, but there is absolutely no way to disturb cognitively held people.

As soon as we went through the main gates of the cemetery, Elisa dropped William’s head.

The weight pulled me into stopping. I almost lose my balance.

“What’s happening?” I asked my aiding elder.

“I can’t,” she said looking down.

“What you mean you can’t? We’re already here!”

“Sorry, but I can’t go back to how I was.”

A thunder rumbled the whole village. The dark blue sky turned black. Rain stormed down on us.

“Please…”

“Sorry,” was the word with which Elisa interrupted my begging.

She left the place sprinting.

Two seconds later, after processing the loss in my team, I dragged the body through the muddy grass in between tombs.

Falling water was blinding my sight. With my forearm attempted to dry my eyes a little.

A shovel was nailed on the soil covering Mr. Bohr’s empty grave.

Thunders roared violently as the precipitation attempted to cause a flood.

I slipped with the watery dirt, which covered me almost completely.

I snatched the shovel and dug.

The storm slid the sludge I was getting out back into the hole.

Unable to see what was in front of me, I continued fighting the weather. My hearing was completely hijacked by the rumbling thunders. My hands had a very poor grip due to the smooth mud covering my whole body. My nose hadn’t purged completely the death smell of the slaughterhouse under the supermarket.

With surprising strength, I lifted the soil-covered and almost tore apart William’s cadaver. It was in my arms, as if I was getting my new wife into our new house. Well, fittingly, I was delivering William to his final home.

I threw the inert mass of burned flesh and cracked bones into the hole I dug.

Water covered almost half of William’s remains.

I nailed the shovel in the mud slope I was going to use to cover the hole. My body stopped responding. My shinbone ignited in a sharp pain that raced through my femur.

“Can’t let you do that!” Mrs. Rowen’s voice chilled my spine.

Without moving my legs, I was turned around by an external force.

Under the blinding rain, thanks to the backlight provided by lightning, Mrs. Rowen’s figure presented as an unstoppable force, stronger than nature itself.

“I know what you’re doing,” I screamed under an excruciating throbbing pain that started to flow through my every nerve. “Leave them rest!”

I couldn’t move. Something outside of me was holding me as a statue. And all the air in my lungs, which I had been able to get out in the form of a mad shriek, was over.

“I think I can,” Mrs. Rowen said in a calmed manner, but still hearable inside my head.

The water poured from the sky as if we were under an Amazonian waterfall.

Mrs. Rowen extended her left arm against me.

The intense and unyielding pain inside my body hit a second struck.

The agony blocked all my responses, almost making me faint.

A windblow of hope punched me from behind and got me into the battle again. My lungs filled with air. My leg muscles started moving forward. My mind was ignoring the pain.

I know I made a promise to never possess you again, but I was out of options, Luke told me directly in my mind.

I’m glad you broke it, I responded to him with my thoughts.

“You filthy creature!” Mrs. Rowen cursed me as I approached her.

She raised her other hand.

A new strike of uncompromising pain slammed my chest.

I shrieked.

My legs stopped.

Luke yelled in agony inside my mind.

The watery mud flowed through my feet.

“I didn’t want to get to this!” Mrs. Rowen informed us.

I’m sorry, Luke. For everything.

It was a hell of a ride, Luke answered inside my brain.

The pile of soil I constructed to the side of William’s grave/hole, avalanched down, covering the damaged cadaver.

William’s phantom-self appeared to my left. He was still in multiple pieces, holding itself together by the magic of the undead.

William’s smiling ghost exploded into pieces.

Mrs. Rowen appeared to be out of her depth.

William phantom’s pieces imploded together over Mrs. Rowen.

She collapsed into the ground. Comatose-like.

The water falling from the sky turned into mist. The lightning gave way to the bright afternoon sun. The blue pushed the dark clouds away. The immobilizing pain inside me went away with the weather.

I stood up without my central nervous system commanding it.

Luke flew out of my mouth as a refreshing burp.

William materialized in front of us.

I pulled out of my pocket the earphone that I use to communicate directly with the next life.

“Thank you, William.” I told the poorly assembled specter. “Thank you for getting her under control, for the goblin situation and in helping me find this.”

I gently tapped my earphone that allows me to communicate directly with Luke. Then, I pointed my right index at my old ghost friend. Luke was confused by that last part.

“William, this is Luke. He’s my ghostly sidekick.”

“A pleasure to meet you,” said the exploded ectoplasmic being while shaking Luke’s hand. “I’m grateful with both of you.”

Luke and I nodded.

William’s magically held parts fell to the ground and rolled into the beyond.

Luke stared at me.

“So, I’m your ghostly sidekick?”

“Don’t get over your head,” I warned him. “But I wouldn’t like a different one.”

Luke smirked. I followed his lead.

“How are we going to help the mute ghost?” I asked my best friend.

***

The next morning, I’m sitting, once again, across the desk at Mrs. Rowen’s office.

“What are we going to do with you?” She asked me.

“You could let me go,” I proposed her with a wide smile.

“I can let you go to another plane of existence.”

“You won’t,” I replied.

She glares at me with defiance.

“If you wanted to kill me, you would have done it already,” I explained her how to do her witchy job. “Not know why you need me alive, but I’m going to find out. Meanwhile, I suggest you let me do my thing here in Morlden Village.”

Defeated, Mrs. Rowen lay back in her chair.

“Leave my office,” she instructed me.

Happily, I compelled and followed her directions.

Outside of the staff quarters, as I strolled away, I placed my supernatural earphone on my ear. Luke floated out of the building.

“Did you find something in the safe?” I asked my partner in crime.

“It has a magical protection,” he answered me. “I found something on Margaret’s room.”

“How do you know Margaret?” It was irrelevant, but curiosity beat me.

“I was in your mind.”

“Fair enough,” I get back into the important stuff. “What did you come across?

“Under her bed, there was a witchcraft totem… A recently made one.”

Part 3 | Part 5

In the Morlden Village there is not a single good night to rest. For the first time in weeks, I was not interrupted by vampires, nightmares or creepy sucking old men as I wandered through Morpheus realm. That would’ve been too good to be true.

Crash.

A metallic sound pulled me out of my resting state and activated my vigilant one. My laptop had fallen from the desk right to my bed. It would have been weird if it had just dropped in the middle of the night without reason. But the cause was odder. A creature, greenish skin, one-foot-tall, with pointy ears and teeth had pushed it to the floor.

“What the fuck?” I murmured to myself.

The monster jumped onto the floor.

I got out of bed.

The goblin snatched my computer.

I tried catching the bastard.

It fled away, with surprising speed for its size.

I chased it out of my room.

That thing, carrying my laptop, slid under the caregiver’s bed, escaping me.

If it would’ve been William, I could have asked him to move just for a little. But this night it was a woman in charge of taking care of the cognitive held patients that live with me in our resident building E.

It took me a minute to evaluate the situation before going to the kitchen to grab a knife (thanks to the interrogatory for murder I endured on my first day here, I knew where and how to get this weapon.) Then, without taking my sight from the caregiver bed, and being as silent as possible to avoid waking her up, I opened Mr. Bohr bedroom. I entered.

He was sleeping so peacefully. But today wasn’t a sleeping night.

With two fingers I pinched his nose, blocking the air in.

He gasped a little. His snoring intensified. He woke up craving oxygen.

The scream came next.

That woke the caregiver and brought her running to this room.

“What happened?” She asked.

“Not sure,” I lied. “He just started screaming in fear out of nowhere.”

“Calm down, Mr. Bohr…”

As she attempted to pacify the situation with my roommate’s paranoia, the other dementia patients that had the bad luck to share a sleeping building with us woke up and started screaming in symphony. A crying old woman and another old man who wanted to take a shower entered the room. The caregiver’s duties swallowed her attention completely.

I escaped the scene and sneaked away into the doorless room where the caregiver slept. I lifted the bed.

There was no goblin there. Just a hole that seemed to have been half-drilled and half-hand carved. I stared at the black irregular 2-feet-wide circle, and it glared back at me. Fucking Nietzschean supernatural shit. I leaped into the darkness.

I fell around a couple of yards before encountering the bottom. It wasn’t deep, but the rock it was made of was abnormally dark.

The hole I had trapped myself in connected with an even darker tunnel. Not even the flashlight of my cellphone brightened more than two meters from where I was standing. It was a low, just 3-feet-diameter pipe chiseled into the darkest rock I ever encountered (not that I’m a geologist, I must add.)

Regretting my decision, I interned into the tunned.

After crawling for the longest minute of my life, my cellphone interrupted my exploration. How was I getting signal down there? Unknown number. With a fair chance of regretting it later, I answered the call.

“Hello?” I asked.

“Hey,” a familiar voice, “how you get down here?”

Luke, my ghost friend which I had been uncomfortably distanced since we arrived at this godforsaken place, came through the ceiling and stopped just in front of me.

“How you find me?” I questioned him.

“I felt your cellphone under the graveyard where I was with Mike. Why don’t you carry the earphone anymore?” Luke asked me through my cellphone. “It facilitates our communication.”

“Stolen. I’m on it. Who’s Mike?”

“The mute ghost I’m trying to help.”

“His name is Mike?”

“Not know. But it is the commonest name in English, so it was the name with better chances of nailing.”

I nodded at my undead friend. My knees hurt under my weight against the hard rocks below. My neck was begging to return to a more natural position.

“I know how to help him now, or at least I believe so,” Luke excitedly told me.

“Not now, I’m in the middle of something.”

Luke’s torn ectoplasmic body became sadder. His body language became stiffer and less open.

“He needs my help,” Luke replied. “And I need yours.”

“Right now, I’m on the middle of something…”

“Sure, I guess you’re looking for the earphone you lost.”

“It’s not that…”

My words just rumbled in the small tunnel where they went unheard by my interlocutor, who faded through the ceiling. Darkness and solitude embraced me.

I continued my crawl for a couple of minutes.

Suddenly, the air became less oppressive. The metaphysical weight of the rock stopped being so intense over my shoulders. A wind blow indicated to me of my arrival to a bigger chamber.

I stood up as I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the spacious oxygen of this fifteen-foot-high cave. My mobile phone’s flashlight circled around the black stone walls that surrounded this place, with multiple goblin height tunnels spreading through them. This was a whole network of tunnels that spread all the way across Morlden Village, and I had just found its heart.

My flashlight landed in the middle of the room. An enormous tower that reached the ceiling imposed magnificently. It glowed. My light hit reflective surfaces, polished metal and fluorescent colors. The shinny scrap mountain reacted to my source of light, vanquishing any shadow in this cove.

But that light also brought with it a whole new level of darkness. The monument also uncovered the goblins that were hiding in the somber areas.

Fuck.

A horde of around a dozen gremlins shrieked. His sharp teeth were pronounced by my light.

I ran away through the tunnel I had come from.

The hyperactive creatures followed me.

I crawled ignoring my knee discomfort.

The rumble behind me caused by scratching talons against hard rock was deafening.

My neck wanted to look down. My curiosity to glimpse back. My survivor instinct kept my eyes to the front.

Light, at the end of the tunnel.

The first goblin charged me.

I stood up in the entrance I had entered through.

The knife slashed a deep wound in the monster.

I jumped out of the hole that got me here in the first place.

Another creature followed my path.

I rolled and stabbed it in a single motion.

The beast fell to the cave again but took the knife with it.

I turned around the caregiver bed, that was still in vertical position as I left it.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

Tonight’s caregiver returned in the most inappropriate moment.

A boney miniature hand with shrunk-looking skin but huge claws emerged from the obscure hole I came from a couple of seconds ago.

I let the bed fall upside down over the portal.

The bones cracked and the little fingers got severed.

“What’s happening?!”

I placed my weight above the bed, blocking completely the entrance to our resting place.

“Not know what they are!” I explained my yelling caregiver.

The bed below me shook a little.

“Call Ms. Rowen!” I indicated my improvised partner.

“She’s out on a trip,” the caregiver replied to me with a high pitch whine only audible to dogs.

A greenish arm slipped out from under the bed.

“Paula and Margaret?”

I dropped my fist against the escaping limb.

“Don’t want to be disturbed.”

The hand swirled back inside.

“I think this is a good exception.”

The bed pushed me with unnatural force from under me.

I flew a couple of seconds in the air before impacting against the resting furniture that was now functioning as a trapdoor.

“But they said…”

“Fuck!” I interrupted the useless caregiver that was underqualified for working in this demented dementia village.

A couple of extremities, green and miniscule, showed themselves from all around the mattress I was holding against the floor.

“William?!” I yelled hoping she would consider calling a fellow caregiver.

“Yes?”

“Get him!”

I gave that instruction before playing a supernatural Whack-a-Mole with goblin fingers and toes.

“William, we need you on Residence Building E,” said the caregiver through her reflective phone.

Fuck.

“Not through a phone!”

She turned at me confused.

The bed under me propelled me outside the small cubicle meant for caregivers to sleep.

The Pandora Box opened and an army of rabid goblins emerged. They swarmed around each other as a homogeneous mass.

The caregiver backed a little. In shock, she didn’t respond to William’s inquiries over the phone.

The green shiny-stuff-desiring horde threw itself against the mobile device my aid held next to her ear. Those things swallowed her.

The revolting gremlin’s mass, with a phone attached to a woman inside, returned to the hellish dimension they came from.

The mess had woken up, again, the five cognitive detriment patients that share the never-quiet building with me. Screams, complaints and stumps fill the area.

I approached the hole that had given birth to these monsters and looked inside it. Black. No trace of those things, nor the poor caregiver whose peaceful night I had stolen from her.

Two minutes later, William broke into the building.

“What happened? Where’s Lucy”

I pointed down to the abyss she had disappeared in.

***

“¿So, what are these creatures that took Lucy?” William asked me.

His voice resounded hard against the claustrophobic walls of the tunnel we’re crawling in.

“Not, sure. They looked like goblins or something like that. They like shiny things.”

My voice was buried under the clacking noise the golf club that I had tied to my waist was producing by being dragged through the irregular ground we were crossing. Yet, my companion seemed to have understood me just fine.

“So, you think they harmed her?”

“Let’s hope not,” was the most optimistic answer I could deliver. “So why Paula and Margaret didn’t come?”

“They said that they don’t have orders to do so…”

William’s idea got interrupted by his own painful cry.

“What?”

I immediately stopped. Couldn’t turn to face him, the tunnel was too small.

“A mirror shard,” he explained. “Must had fallen from my bag. I’ll make sure it is secured.”

“Be careful.”

I continued the crawl. I felt William’s presence keep up with my rhythm. That gave me faith that it wasn’t such a bad injury.

“You think Mrs. Welch jewelry will be enough? How will we explain it to her?”

His anxiousness was contagious. I fought that urge to descend to that.

“It has to be,” was the badassest and most confident reply I came up with. “And she won’t even notice. No one here ever notices when something is missing.”

I felt William nodding behind me. Even if I could have turned, the darkness wouldn’t have allowed me to see him. We were developing a strong connection.

We continued moving forward until my hand felt the colder surface of the stone ground in the chamber of stolen things.

I heard a clashing noise coming from the front of us.

I shushed my companion.

This time our trip was done without a lantern, so my eyes were more accustomed to the blackness. Yet, it wasn’t enough to distinguish anything. I took out my shirt and rolled it over the flashing side of my torch multiple times. When I turned it on, the light was so diffused that nothing shone or glowed back, but the soft light was enough to make sense of where we were.

I exited the tunnel into the big central chamber as carefully as possible. I help William do the same. With my finger on my mouth, I indicated to him to control his awe.

There were goblins surrounding the scrap tower. Almost like they adored that monolith, they were in a radial formation around it. Quiet. Steady. Asleep.

William and I avoided them as we approached the construction in the center. At the base of it, looking up, I found my stolen laptop. I indicated William, by spiraling my finger, to check around the construction. Surprisingly, he understood it; the connection was palpable.

By myself, without any rope or anything, I climbed the goblin made mountain.

“She’s here,” William whispered at me.

My sphincter clutched. No gremlin moved or reacted to that. Maybe they have bad hearing. My asshole relaxed.

I looked around the tower. Down there, on the opposite side of me, there was Lucy. Unconscious, laying against a big mirror. How the fuck these creatures got these things?

“Good,” I muttered back.

I returned to my endeavor. Carefully, and with an engineering mind, I manage to retrieve my laptop without anything collapsing. I breathed again after achieving it. I stashed my treasure in my bag, in the compartment where I didn’t have mirror shreds nor jewelry.

William carried Lucy. Now below me.

“What are you doing?” He mumbled very intensely.

I implied him, with my index and thumb close to each other, to give me a second.

He wasn’t thrilled about it.

In the opening from where my laptop was supposed to be, I could see two more missing things. The key to my room, with its bulky blue keychain that indicated my room number. And the earphone I had acquired to talk to Luke.

“Let’s go,” William pressured me.

I shoved my hand inside the structure. They were hidden deep. I couldn’t see what I was doing. My touch delivered me to the big keychain. It was stuck. I pulled it out aggressively. It got loose. Everything stood still.

I exhaled in relief.

The polished cup, in which I had my right foot supported, lose its grip.

I fell.

“Run!” I yelled over the violent sound my body made while surfing down the tower.

The goblins woke up.

I landed on William’s side. He left Lucy down. I grabbed my golf club, and he took the baseball bat found in the shed with both hands.

The first nightmare creature jumped against us.

William bashed him away.

A second from behind tasted the cold iron of my weapon.

A fat one bit the bat.

Two approached swirling in the ground towards Lucy.

William broke the bastard’s head by smashing the wood against the rock floor.

I swung what would have been a two-gremlin hole in one.

The bat broke into pieces due to the impact blast.

“Take her out of here,” I commanded as my club got bent after a solid head monster got in its way. “Through the other side.”

William bent down to pick up the barely awake Lucy.

I threw Mrs. Welch jewelry against the closest stone wall.

Clank. Clank. Clank. Clank. Clank, clank, clank.

That sound, that promise of shiny things, drove the goblins towards it. Giving us a couple of seconds.

“Now!” I demanded.

William ran to the other side of the room.

I tossed the broken mirror shreds to the ground.

The goblins charged against me.

I took my shirt off the flashlight.

Approximately twenty shrieks in unison hurt my eardrums as if they had been punctured with multiple needles.

I directed the torch to the shreds.

They glowed.

The goblins forgot me and leaped towards the splash of shreds I had caused.

I ran to the other side of the monolith.

Multiple tunnels. One shone a second after the beam of the flashlight passed through it. The vestige of the dripping bag of mirror fragments.

The gremlins lose their interest in my diversion.

I launched the flashlight against the swarm that was after me.

It hijacked the creatures’ attention for a second. They revolted in place.

I entered the tunnel William had selected hoping that it would lead us to an exit. A close one preferably.

After a couple of yards, I hit something squishy. Legs. Standing legs. Meaning: an exit.

“William?” I wondered.

“Yes,” his voice was so comforting. “I’m getting Lucy out.”

The struggle of his pushing got obfuscated by the blasting sound of around twenty little monsters thumping towards us.

“I’m out,” Lucy’s barely hearable voice acted as a beacon of hope.

“Go!”

William pushed himself out of the caverns.

The rumble intensified.

I followed his example.

A furious cry came from the tunnel.

We exited to another resident building. Later I knew it was A. It was clearly different from all the others I’d visited, but it still was perfect as you might expect an European old couple’s house. Everything was, but the hole we had just come through, which connected the floor below the caregiver’s bed to the supernatural web of goblin tunnels.

“The bed,” I indicated as quickly as I could.

The moving flesh of the creatures was already visible.

William and I slammed the furniture where a caregiver was sleeping a couple of minutes ago against the clandestine entry to our sanctuary.

“Help us!” William demanded his colleague.

The caregiver of residence building A, as well as the almost fainting Lucy, leaped over the bed that William and I were attempting to keep in place.

A couple of strong blows hit us from below.

A scratch, like something heavy being dragged to the floor, came from one of the patients’ rooms.

Another pounding, less intense than the priors, pushed up.

We didn’t yield.

The door of a close room opened.

The struggle with the felony-propense underground creatures stopped.

Elisa, the old woman I had encountered in the middle of the night when I arrived here for the first time, showed her face through the barely open door. She was extremely scared.

“Did you find my ring?”

***

Less than ten minutes later, William and I were in the medical unit. Carly, the nurse, was taking care of a traumatized and possible shocked forever mentally weak caregiver.

“What happened now?” the medical professional asked.

“You don’t want to know,” William replied.

That just upset her more.

“Goblins,” I added without missing a beat. “A whole colony under Morlden Village.”

Lucy, who was just freed from these captors, grunted with discomfort as Carly pinched a needle through her arm.

“How do you know they’re goblins?” William asked.

“Really with this fantasy shit?” Carly questioned.

“It’s true,” were Lucy’s last words before falling unconscious.

“Not sure what they are, but I had to name them somehow.”

William nodded at my answer.

“He has issues, right?” Carly asked the still conscious caregiver while pointing at me with her head.

“Come on,” I directed my attention to the medical professional. “You’re gonna tell me you haven’t noticed anything weird in this place?”

“Never had to work so much before you arrived.”

“Ouch. But I mean it.”

“Not that I can recall,” Carly talked to me without taking her eyes off her patient.

“Everything here is so ridiculously perfect. Not a single leak. All the lightbulbs work perfectly, even the exterior ones. The grass is always at a perfect two-inch height. Never seen a single piece of furniture scratched.”

William stared at nothingness while reflecting on the obvious that had been in front of him all along.

“Maybe, the maintenance team do their job really well.”

Carly was in the process of negation. Out of the bargain dynamic.

“Have you ever seen anyone doing any of those chores?” I concluded my argument.

I exited the medical unit without giving a chance for an answer. I didn’t expect one, either.

William reached me on the road that leads to the staff quarters.

“What are you doing?”

“I hope I can figure out with Ms. Rowen why everyone here still treats me as if I was a fucking looney with dementia,” I answered him.

“She’s not here…”

“Someone must be.” I interrupted him.

He stopped walking. I left him behind a couple of feet before I stopped myself and turned to him.

“I also need to retrieve something from down there,” I explained him.

“Why? You already have your missing laptop. And that almost got us caught!”

“Those things stole an earphone of mine.”

“I’ll get you another,” William’s caring was genuine.

“It must be that one.”

“Why?”

“You wouldn’t understand it, man.”

I started walking away.

“Then you’re on your own!” William screamed at me.

He marched in the opposite direction.

***

Mrs. Rowen’s office was empty. The huge desk, the warm lights and old pictures covering the walls didn’t help to make this a cozier place. Yet, something was weird. Unnatural.

There was this nerving sensation in this place. It wasn’t the heavy vibe you get when you’re in a place where a violent action took place, even when in this room a murder was committed against the previous manager. The usual pinch that burned my shinbone every time that I had been into this room, also present when in contact with evil or supernatural shit, was missing. It was more like a feeling that there was something hidden here.

I searched the room completely. Every drawer just contained records of old people with cognitive impairment. The books were all about psychology and socialization. The enormous safe box, high enough that it reaches the ceiling, was sealed and there was no way I could manage to break the cold iron it was made of.

A photograph hijacked my attention. It was hung on the wall with a discrete frame. It felt important. From the texture of it you could know it was old, with a lot of grain and undefined edges. There was Ms. Rowen at the center, surrounded by a group of four women, all about their forties. But it couldn’t be Ms. Rowen, it must have been a previous Mrs. Rowen who was also a manager here at Morlden Village. William’s weird theory seemed more plausible.

Nonetheless, what was more disturbing about the picture was the lady in the right. She looked familiar. I had never met her before. But, I have seen her… in my dreams. That woman was my grandmother.

“What are you doing here?” A familiar voice interrupted my train of thought.

Paula and Margaret stood on the threshold of the room.

“Patients aren’t allowed here,” Paula clarified.

“I’m not a…”

“You must be confused. Margaret will accompany to your residence.”

“Where’s Ms. Rowen?” I demanded.

“Hey, calm down.” Margaret’s calm and sweet voice gave her the power to approach me without me resorting to violence.

“She returns tomorrow,” Paula said. “I’ll tell her you want to see her.”

“No, stop this! I need your help with the stealing goblins under the village.”

“You have some serious issues with reality.”

“You know I’m not lying!”

“Sure we know,” finalized Paula.

I felt really calm and relaxed somehow.

I looked for Margaret, who had just injected me with a syringe.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Blackness.

***

I woke up like ten hours later. In my room on building E. Everything was in its place, as if I hadn’t been living here for almost a month now.

Fucking bitches are gaslighting me. And they drugged me!

Still, I need to get to my earphone.

Thankfully, I had retrieved my laptop, and I didn’t have any internet restrictions to search things. This led me to plan b.

From the rotten, non-money-based supermarket I retrieve a candle, but no matchsticks nor lighters. I know it would be dangerous for cognitive held patients, but the fact that they can get a candle never to be turned on was ridiculous. I didn’t question it to the clerk and got a big one that could stand on its own. Then I hoped the universe would provide.

After we took care of the vampire from the shed, there was no real reason to keep it closed.  That was good news because if not this whole operation would have gone to shit. The fortune was on my side that day.

Inside the shed I found everything I needed. A big bucket, a wooden plank, a rope, a zippo and ammonium nitrate, which I just don’t get why it keeps being commercialized as a fertilizer. Also, as if it was meant to happen, a fucking disco mirror ball (thanks destiny.)

In an open park, the closest to residence building A, I constructed the trap. Filled the bucket with the ammonium nitrate and covered it with the wood. I tied the rope to the board and placed the candle on top of it. With hardware from the shed I constructed a structure that suspended the disco ball high over the chemical. And, just to make sure, I surrounded the construction with flashlights, shovels with reflective surfaces, personal mirrors and any other shiny thing I could find in the shed and supermarket. It was a shining monument impossible to ignore.

Night fell upon me.

I lit the candle.

The fortunate thing about living with just old people is that they go to bed even before sunset, so no one was peeking into my construction. And even on residence building A the only awakened person was the caregiver who, this time, I had no patience for her.

I didn’t ask her name. Just passed through her and lifted the bed where she was meant to sleep. She stopped trying to prevent my intentions once she saw the hole that connected the underground network of greedy goblins with our beloved dementia village.

I jumped inside it. I threw mirror shreds to the tunnel that connected this entryway with the center of this creatures’ lair. I also threw a flashlight inside.

“Run,” I indicated the caregiver.

The beam of light shone and reflected all the way through the cavern.

The goblin’s shriek shook the building.

The caregiver finally listened to my advice.

A horde approached me.

I exited the hole.

Like a fountain of greenish flesh, the swarm burst from the hole.

I left the building with a shining torch, indicating the way to my pursuers (like a high-heels lady with a T. Rex.)

They caught the game quickly.

The monstrous grunts approached me from behind.

I ran faster.

I felt the heat of those bastards on my nape.

I tossed my source of light at the park.

The gremlins leaped over me after it.

A couple of little scratches, but nothing major. Carly will be upset for sure.

I crawled towards a bush where I had left the other end of the rope tied to the wooden plank.

The beacon of light and shininess I erected for them worked perfectly. The whole colony of around twenty bastards engulfed the monument.

I pulled the rope.

The line pulled the board.

The candle that was meant to fall on the ammonium nitrate, didn’t. Fuck. The melted wax had glued it to the wood. Fuck!

Improvise time. I left my hiding and went back to building A. The caregiver was there again, but I reiteratively ignored her as I entered to the cave network.

I crawled along the tunnel all the way to the central chamber. Spacious, with more breathable air, an enormous tower of shinny scrap in the middle and, for the moment, goblin-free.

I escalated through mirrors and jewelry all the way to the hole I had left after retrieving my computer. From there, I was able to see the earphone.

I breathed deeply as I pushed my hand inside. My fingers felt a lot of cold metallic surfaces. I growled as I shoved my arm further. Something poked my armpit, but I kept going. My fingers sensed some organic form. Jackpot.

The rumble of the goblin army returning to its homeplace with their prize shook my nervous system.

I pulled out.

The uncomfortable foul smell of these beasts hit my nose.

The earphone came out of its place in the structure.

A deafening roar from the tunnel I had used flooded the entire chamber.

I lose my balance. My grip failed me. I rolled down the scrap mountain as it came down on me as an avalanche.

I stood up as the goblins stormed into the chamber.

They cried at me in an anger-fueled unison. It got concealed under the hail rain of shiny shit I had caused.

I disappeared through the closest tunnel.

The creatures danced in desperation around their broken construction before chasing me.

That couple of seconds gave me enough headstart to reach the exit through my luckily well-known residence building E.

The swarm of furious critters widened the entrance to our reality by all of them crossing through it at the same time. The wall, ceiling and floor of the whole building got broken, cracked or displaced.

I slammed the main door behind me as I escaped that place.

The unhinged bulk of goblins all smushed against each other, all with the single purpose of getting me, destroyed my supposed obstacle as if it was nothing.

I rushed towards the park as all the muscles in my body popped.

The mad gremlin’s mass had no intention of stopping.

When I reached the grass, a scratch on my calf made a blood sprinkler out of my leg.

The next time I stepped on that foot, my weight betrayed me.

The creatures behind me shriek with rage.

I rolled in the grass.

The zippo flew out of my pocket.

The goblins mass swallowed me.

I protected the earphone below my body and against the grass.

Talons slashed my back. Pointy fangs pierced my legs. Sharp claws ripped my skin open. Jaws full of unstoppable teeth bit all of me.

With all the air left on my lungs I yelled in absolute pain. That was the only thing I could do.

I had resigned for this to be it. Inside this conglomerate of supernatural creatures. I’ve failed Luke. Never figured out why Mrs. Rowen wanted him death and sent him to the Bachman Asylum in the first place. I would not be able to help him with the mute ghost from the graveyard. Maybe he will never find some closure.

Suddenly, the scratches and chewing ceased. The weight of a whole society of bloodlust goblins left my back. The pain didn’t go with them.

I try to make sense of what happened.

“Over here!” William’s voice seemed so far away.

He was next to the bucket of ammonium nitrate. Shit.

I failed in my attempt to get up.

The beyond-reasoning gremlins charged him.

I tried to get to him by dragging myself through the perfect grass of the park.

William held the zippo high in the air.

The goblins were hypnotized by the flame, like bugs to the light.

“No!” I flopped to get that out of my lungs.

William smiled as he pushed his hand with the turned-on zippo into the bucket full of fertilizer, and the whole society of underground critters buried him.

BOOM!

***

Next day, I woke up as good as new in the medical unit. No open wounds, no dizziness from the explosion, no more bleeding, not even scars. There’s no way Carly is that good at nursing. She welcomed me back to the land of the living.

“Seems like your ‘goblins’ aren’t that deadly, huh?”

I got out of bed. I expected my legs to frail under my weight, but they didn’t.

“William?” I limited all my questions to just a single word.

Carly made a weird gesture.

“Mrs. Rowen wants to see you.”

All the way to the staff quarters, it caught my attention that everything was as good as new. The park seemed in perfect condition, without guts all over it and not even a blast crater. Later it turned out that my damaged residence building was also restored in record time to its usual stereotypical appearance.

I arrived at the boss’ office. She was waiting for me. As soon as I entered the room, I noticed the picture of her with my grandmother missing from the wall, now there was only a bare nail. My shinbone stung me as usual.

“William?” I demanded to know.

“Who?” Ms. Rowen smiled while pretending to be oblivious. “Are you okay? We found you having escaped from your room and slept in the park. We believe you fell down a hill.”

“No, that isn’t true. There were goblins, and a whole explosion…”

“Breath,” she had such a calmed voice. “We would have noticed something like that. You’re just confused.”

“Bullshit!”

I stood up.

“Don’t fuck with me,” I warned her. “You know why I was brought here. That I took care of your vampire issue last week. So, Ms. Rowen…”

“Mrs. Rowen,” she interrupted me.

“What?”

“Please called me Mrs. Rowen.”

I was more confused now than before entering.

“I thought that Mrs. Rowen was your aunt…”

“Yes,” she kept interrupting me. “And now that I’m taking full charge of Morlden Village, I think it will be fitting for me to be refer to as Mrs. Rowen.”

“Well, Mrs. Rowen,” I decided to humor her a little. “What I want to know is why everybody here keeps treating me as if I have dementia and was a patient here.”

Mrs. Rowen pushed the button inside the left upper drawer.

“You’re just confused. Rest a little and then I’ll personally make sure everything is in order.”

Paula and Margaret showed up at the threshold; they really like that spot.

“They’ll take you to your room on building E,” Mrs. Rowen sentenced.

Margaret held a syringe in her left hand.

I got the message, and cooperated with them.

***

Back in my room, I was writing this, hoping it would make some sense in hindsight and wouldn’t be just the babblings of a guy with very early cognitive deterioration, when a sound came out of the drawer next to my bed. It was as if something vibrated in there.

I checked inside and found my earphone. It was still. I grabbed it hoping it would make some more noise.

Burr.

Rapidly, I placed it on my left ear.

“Lu…?”

Before I could finish my question, William’s voice interrupted me.

“Don’t have much time.”

Suddenly, in front of me, ectoplasmic pieces of flesh and internal organs imploded into a phantom version of William. His sight was lost in the horizon as a “Polar Express” character.

“Please, help me…”

William’s prayer turned into an agony shriek as his ectoplasmic body exploded.

Fuck.

Part 2 | Part 4

I hate dreaming about my unknown grandmother and her creepy Victorian house, which I only recognized because Morpheus’ realm works in mysterious ways. Also, the injury a witch did to me as an infant, apparently cursed me with knowledge of things that I shouldn’t be aware of.

It was the same place where we left it. My old granny was in front of her desk. The torn and dancing blinds, with the storm just right outside, obfuscated the candles that were the only thing keeping our joints over the freezing point. The smell of a just blown matchstick mixed with that of old paper in the edge of defibrating itself wasn’t particularly comfortable.

My grandmother held with her noisy arthritis an envelope that was getting more like a ball than getting open. Finally, her tears helped to contrast the glue effect, which freed the content of the epistle.

Her shaky hands took a picture out of the folded paper. I knew that one. It is me with my ex-girlfriend, Lisa. That was just a couple of days before the tragedy. Before I was thrown into prison. Technically she was my fiancé, but I never called her like that because I didn’t get used to it. The photograph was taken on the day I proposed to her.

My ascendent couldn’t distinguish neatly what was on the photograph with or without her glasses. Nonetheless, she knew exactly what it was.

“Hopefully,” my elder grandmother’s hoarse voice rumbled the fragile building. “You and your family will last long.”

I desired her good wishes would have been more effective.

The owls hooted, storming loudly as if the room was full of those birds.

She kissed the picture with her wrinkled lips before storing it in the pitch-dark void that was her desk drawer, never to be seen again. Then, she turned back to me. Her bones cracked a little and her whole skin was dripping more than previous times. She looked quite different, yet still somewhat familiar.

“Be careful,” she said.

A cold chill inducing force stabbed me in the chest.

***

When I woke up, Luke, the ghost that had followed me from the last couple of months all the way to this dementia village with the hope of questioning who sent him to die at the hands of a murderous psychopathic ghoul, had his ectoplasmic arm inside my chest.

Scared, I pulled back into my bed.

Luke retrieved his cold arm outside of me.

My movement woke up the caregiver who was looking for me that night, following the constant surveillance that I was placed upon by Ms. Rowen. He looked directly at me through Luke’s body, invisible to him.

“Just a nightmare,” I said still recovering my breath.

He just nodded and closed his eyes again.

Luke pointed his bleeding finger to his badly shaped ear.

The caregiver started to snore lightly.

I grabbed my cellphone and, quietly, like Elvis Presley, left the building.

***

“And you got mad with me?!” Luke yelled through my cellphone, since the earphone that we normally used for direct communication was lost. “First you accuse me of murdering the manager, which I told you I didn’t and she fucking deserved it for sending me to die, and now you killed a fucking cognitive held octogenary?”

The cold wind from this Nordic country made it hard to breathe and move. We were in an open area, far from any resident building to avoid waking someone, but that allowed nature to take a clear shot at me.

Steps approached from our left. Shit.

I hid behind the building that during office hours is used as a barbershop.

I waited until the danger faded.

The new nightguard strolled through the avenue and disappeared when he turned left. He didn’t even notice me. Thankfully. There was no way that I could have convinced him a second time that I was on his side.

“I didn’t,” I resumed my conversation with Luke. “I just wanted to incapacitate him so he will not continue biting or sucking me at every chance he had.”

“So, you threw him off a bridge?”

That bastard made it sound so much worse than it was.

“It’s more of a high pass, and I needed an alibi.”

“He died,” Luke pointed.

“After he got stabilized in the hospital,” I remarked.

“You sure got a perfect cover.”

We both stayed in silence, staring at each other. My pride was stronger than the freezing weather.

“There is something evil here.”

Not strong enough.

“I know,” Luke acknowledged. “I need your help.”

The staring contest restarted.

“Please.”

“What you need?”

***

It turns out that the Morlden Village has its own graveyard. On the Northwest corner there is a small lot with as many headstones as empty spaces for future deceased elders.

“I guess is quite often people die here,” I pointed out to Luke. “I see why you had been around this area.”

His silent response was so cold that it helped the hypothermia the weather had been attempting.

“I’m sorry, okay?” I told him while going over a big root that swirled across the main way.

Luke looked at me while leading through the place.

The moonlight shone through him, and got out refracted in different colors as if Luke was a Newtonian prince that brough a little light to this somber place.

I smirked.

He returned it, barely.

He led me to the end of the not so small eternal resting place. Sitting over a grave there was a guy. Young, healthy and, for some reason, in the worst place to be.

“He’s a ghost,” Luke pointed out as we approached him.

“Yeah, this sure seems like a place for him to be.”

Luke wasn’t too fond of my comments. He never was, but never so intensely as that night.

The guy didn’t seem like a ghost. He was quite young, healthy and a complete specimen of the human species, especially for the standards of the people who live and die here.

“Okay,” I directed to my new acquaintance by touching my phone I had pressed against my right ear. “I need you to make contact with this for me to be able to hear you.”

Silence.

I turned to Luke.

“Hey, can you teach him how to do it?”

“It’s not like riding a bike,” he responded.

“What you mean by that?”

“Well, I’m not sure how to teach another spirit how to paranormally jam a phone to talk through it,” Luke argued. “The world beyond life doesn’t work as easy or straight forward as the one before death.”

Fuck. He had a point. I must give him that.

“I’m sorry,” I turned back to the newly met unresting soul. “Just realized when you died. Maybe you just don’t know what a cellphone is.”

The phantom stood up from the grave and started moving his arms in a weird way.

“Yeah,” I expressed full of doubt. “Let me see your grave.”

It read: “1895 – 1935. No last words.”

That was harsh.

“I don’t think this phone thing is going to work,” Luke told me.

“Seems so, he died before even landlines where a common thing.” I said as I turned back to Luke. “Also, this place must be older than the dementia village concept.”

I shut up as soon as I noticed the new ghost kept moving his hands, and Luke stared at them with a lot of attention and an equal amount of incomprehension. I too, watched this scene develop for a couple of minutes.

“Fuck,” Luke and I said at the same time. “He’s mute.”

Just what we needed, a fucking talk-less ghost that even dead still only communicates by sign language.

“When you die you don’t get functional vocal cords or something?” I questioned Luke without taking my eyes from the voguing specter. “You don’t even need air to talk.”

Holy shit. “No Last Words.” Those fuckers were cruel.

“Not know how shit works when you die,” Luke repeated me to concentrated to be annoyed by me not understanding him the first time. “If you could, I won’t think I’ll be still materializing as this half-torn and half-shapeless vestige of a human being.”

I hate to admit it, but he was making some serious points that night.

“I think he says he wants to go to his grave,” Luke pointed out.

The mute ghost jumped (don’t know if they can do that or simply floated a little) in excitement.

“How?” I asked whoever of my two not-completely-gone interlocutors could give me an answer.

The guy pointed to his chest.

“Chest?” I questioned.

“No, Love,” Luke was such a passionate guy.

The mute phantom shook his head.

Kept pointing at his chest, and then his grave.

“You died out of love?”

The impatient motherfucker shook his head again, covering it with both hands in frustration. Fuck him, he had nothing to do.

On the contrary, I did.

“Maybe what happened is…”

“I’m going,” I interrupted Luke. “If you figure it out, you know where you can find me.”

I started getting away from the two phantoms through the small road in the middle of the dark graveyard.

Luke followed me. He was very upset.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” His scream made my phone sound as if I had it on speaker.

“I need to rest,” I replied in a similar tone. “You know, we alive people need that.”

“This isn’t you,” Luke said as if that meant something. “You’re not like this. You should be…”

I dropped my mobile down from my ear before hearing, before listening (which was worse), what Luke was trying to tell me.

“You hear that?” I asked Luke while I turned around.

Yelling, far away. I’m almost positive it was my name.

“AAAGGGHHHHH!” A shriek of pain flooded the whole village.

Fuck.

I ran towards the sound. Abandoned Luke and our new friend behind.

I tripped with a root in the middle of the way. Hit against the dirt road in the middle of the graveyard. Left behind of me a small trail of blood when I resumed my way.

I arrived at the park where the yelling came from.

The guy who was keeping an eye on me that night was on the ground. Worryingly pale. Had a human bite on his neck.

Multiple caregivers arrived.

***

“Why every time something bad happens it involves you?” Ms. Rowan interrogated me using very similar phrase as Professor McGonagall.

Again, at her office. My broken and healed shinbone, as usual in this rustic and warmly lit place, was burning as if a branding iron was pressed against it.

“Maybe, you shouldn’t had imposed me 24/7 caregivers to be behind me all the time,” I replied fighting to contain my smile.

“You were close to both victims,” she indicated. “Seems like you’re behind this. You were also the new one the night my aunt was killed.”

“I got exonerated from that. Mr. Melvin died while in the medical unit; I was right here with you. And when I arrived at the scene the last guy was already bitten.”

“What were you doing out?” She just didn’t quit.

“Wandering. Breathing clear air. Having a second of privacy.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“That’s your problem.”

We both stared in silence for a couple of minutes.

“You’re going to get assigned a new caregiver to your team,” she threatened me. “And have them all make sure you cannot abandon building E.”

She knew exactly how to hurt me.

“Please, no,” I pitifully begged. “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do anything. Why don’t you ask the guard, he maybe saw something.”

The violence of the conversation shifted to a peaceful confusion.

“What guard?” She was still playing games.

“The new nightguard,” I replied to her stupid question. “He has just been here for two nights.”

“We don’t have a nightguard,” lied Ms. Rowen at the same time she shook her head.

“Bullshit!” I raised my tone at her. “I saw him, even talked to him. He was wearing the batch.”

Ms. Rowen disbelief started to seem genuine in her face.

“A young guy, with a very prominent mustache…”

“Fuck,” Ms. Rowen’s mumbling whisper interrupted me.

“That’s new.”

Ms. Rowen stood up and speed walked around the room a couple of times.

“Okay, shit. We are in trouble.”

“Why?” I asked genuinely surprised.

“Okay, fuck it.” Ms. Rowen said.

She sat in the chair opposite mine, on the other side of her enormous wooden desk. She took from out of a drawer a thick folder with a record inside. Showed it to me.

“Is he the nightguard?” She questioned me, pointing at a picture.

“Yes.”

Why was his photo on an old patient record? And of a female one?

“Fuck!” She hit her own desk.

I remained silent, expecting her to spill more information.

“Okay,” she stared directly into my eyes all the way to my soul. “I need your help.”

“Fuck that,” I furiously let her know.

“I know who you are,” she told me exhaling with frustration. “I know why my aunt hired you.”

“What?!” Rageful wasn’t enough to describe my tone and emotions.

“I know she hired you to come here to help with some weird thing that has been happening here lately, because everyone was acting more… violently. I’m aware of your whole experience on the Bachman Asylum solving this kind of things.”

“And why the fuck you have had everyone acting like I’m another crazy guy in this nuthouse?!”

I wanted to leave this room so badly. My hot shinbone was almost to its ashing point, but I needed answers.

“I’m sorry, but after the police and the death of my aunt, I was afraid you would’ve left,” she stated.

“Obviously!” I screamed, imitating a mentally impaired person just to upset her.

“I know,” that bastard pretended to be ashamed. “But, if you left, you wouldn’t have resolved the issue happening with this place. I hoped that at least by staying unwillingly you would have done something.”

“But…” I had nothing to argue with.

It was stupid, yes. Some weird way of kidnapping, of course. But, nonetheless, she was right.

“Please, help us with our issue. I’ll get rid of the caregivers. No one will be following you. But I really don’t have a free place in the staff quarters for you to sleep. We really need your help.”

“Okay,” I whispered defeated. “What do you need me to do?”

She smiled with contagious relief.

“Well, you opened the shed and let this fucker off his coffin.”

Fuck, she knows. She pointed to another picture in the record of the same red coffin that I saw a couple of nights ago in the shed.

“Now, you put that bastard back in there before he kills someone else.”

This was insane.

“And how do you expect me to do that?” I buried the sarcasm included in that phrase.

“You’ll get help. William will be with you.”

My jaw dropped at the stupid idea of this woman.

Ms. Rowen clicked a button on the inside of the main drawer of her desk. Or at least it seemed like that was what she did.

I stared judgmentally at my interlocutor. She didn’t bother at all.

The door behind me opened with a blunt sound.

I got startled. Turned back immediately to encounter two caregivers. Both in their twenties, and with the fake big smile caregivers are required to show all the time. One of them was the same that informed Ms. Rowen about Mr. Melvin death last time I was in this office.

“They are Paula and Margaret, two of my more trustworthy employees,” Ms. Rowan introduced them. “They’ll help you with your plan.”

***

I didn’t have a plan at that point. And I am oblivious to what the fuck two young caregivers could do to do to stop a vampire. Yet, to be honest, I didn’t know what I was going to do either.

During the whole sunlight hours, we cover every inch of this enormous place looking for the unmissingable bright red coffin. It was nowhere to be found. Fuck

I came up with the most sensical (at that moment) stupid plan ever. I went to the supermarket and got some garlic, which I hoped hadn’t lost any of its folklore-vampire-hurting properties through the multiple years it surely had been there. Then, from the shed that I had unlocked, and now was one big red coffin emptier, I took a couple of wooden planks and carved them into stakes. I gave half these weapons to Paula and Margaret, me and William kept the other half, and we stayed up all night vigilating this whole place in pairs hoping to get attacked while trusting pop culture had correct ideas on how to deal with blood suckers; even when the one we were up against didn’t had fangs.

So that’s how that night I ended up alone with William wandering through the openness of the main boulevard of the Morlden Village.

“So, why do I need the garlic covered stake?” William asked me as if my plan was something else than idiot proof.

“There’s a vampire guy loose here, and we need to kill him.”

“Right…” William said with way more vowels than needed.

“Did Ms. Rowen didn’t explain you why you are following me?” I asked very frustrated.

“She just told me that you no longer were needing full time watching. But that you had this crazy idea that I must compel with.”

He was not firmly and calmly talking as usual. His voice was shaking and tumbling a little. His whole attitude was a more nervous one.

“That bitch!” I didn’t have those issues.

William glared at me.

“Bottom line,” I indicated him. “I’m not cognitive held so stop treating me like that, because we need to hunt a motherfucking vampire.”

“Sure,” again with the multiple ‘u’s in his pronunciation.

I was too overwhelmed to try to explain it at that moment. I thought, tomorrow I’ll be fixing it with Ms. Rowen.

The new nightguard appeared behind us.

“Hey, what are you doing up?” he asked us still in his fake role.

We turned towards him.

“We’re trying to hunt…”

“Shut it, William!” I interrupted him before spilling the beans.

I approached steadily to our prey.

“What are those sharp wooden sticks?” He asked not with his firm nightguard voice, but with a cautious one.

“They have garlic,” William spilled them all on my face.

“Fuck, William!” I reprimanded him as I threw myself against our foe.

He moved to the side and blocked my attack.

“William!” I demanded his aid.

The guy with the fake badge kicked my left knee.

I lost my balance.

The guy pulled back.

William did nothing.

I hit the ground.

All my air left my lungs.

My weapon rolled away.

“Sorry about that,” William told the kicker while approaching him. “He has this hallucination of hunting vampires.”

Fuck you, William. I couldn’t tell him that because my respiratory system was just restarting itself.

“Don’t worry, I understand,” said with such compassion the man who incapacitated me as he kept getting closer to my useless partner.

With a lot of pain and difficulty, I stood up on one leg.

“But he’s right,” the fucker ended.

The vampire attacked William’s neck.

I completely stood up.

William shrieked.

I hit the blood sucker bare fist on the back of his head.

He left his supper and slapped me with the inertia of his turn to face me.

I flew a couple of feet.

“You bastard!” He insulted me with a, very unlike him, rudeness and anger.

I landed close to my stake.

“William, you okay?”

I grabbed the sharp wood.

William mumbled incomprehensibly.

“Not for long,” the imposing guy threatened.

I rolled still on the floor and pushed the garlic-covered stick against him.

The supernatural entity clasped his hands around it.

I pushed.

He pressed harder.

I screamed with all my strength placed on making my spear go through that guy, or at least stop it from approaching me.

He was not even trying.

“You really can’t do anything against me.”

The vampire playful smile turned into a wide bloodlust abyss.

The stake, with the pointy side towards my adversary, had its dull end stump against my chest.

My yell became a cough.

Smash!

The vampire’s pressure disappeared when William baseballed the undead man’s head with his stake.

The evil creature swiveled into the darkness at a speed that only left a blur behind him.

I retrieve as much oxygen as I could from the almost frozen atmosphere.

Before I complained to William for smashing the blood thirsty beast instead of stabbing it, he collapsed over me.

***

I took him to the medical unit, kind of carrying it, but mostly dragging his heavy ass. I delivered him to the nurse who sleeps at that place and these past days have been having way more work than usual.

She told me that William would be up in a couple of hours.

“Hear that? You’ll be fine, don’t be such a baby,” I told the unconscious guy who had saved me just a couple of minutes ago.

The nurse pretended to ignore me. Such a fragile sense of humor.

She looked for something on her computer, quite old but functional.

“He didn’t lose so much blood,” she indicated me. “With just a bag he should be ready to go.”

“And you have it here, right?”

“I should…” she said with an almost unhearable volume.

She passed her finger through the data shown on her computer.

“No,” she concluded. “Not his type.”

“Fuck.”

“In the last few days many people had been using our universal blood because apparently there is a pandemic of blood drained bodies around here. What do you want from me?”

It turned out she did know how to be sarcastic after all.

“What’s your type?” she asked me.

“Tall and blonde,” I joked.

She didn’t find it funny.

“O negative,” I answered her question knowing what that meant.

“Wonderful!”

***

A couple of hours later, at the brink of dawn, I headed, with slight dizziness and my arm recently poked, to the staff quarters. The nurse Carly (who gave me her name while doing the job the vampire left pending) had told me that in between them, in a building that doesn’t look like it, there is a chapel. I hate chapels.

After watching the cross in the medical center, I thought of religion. Not because I’m a believer, but because maybe, if my theories and movie preferences are correct, we could weaponize it. Also, I needed to go to the manager’s office to understand why that fucker didn’t tell the truth to my caregiver who almost got drained to death for believing I was a loony. Two birds, one trip.

Ms. Rowen’s office was closed. And, as expected, just being outside of that place had my shinbone like New Year’s sky.

“Fuck!”

From the offices that were just outside the waiting room where I got interrogated by the police the second time, Paula and Margaret appeared.

“What happened?” Paula asked.

“We were attacked by the motherfucker vampire. William is bloody bleeding in urgent care right now. And, for God’s sake, I don’t know where this bitch fucking is!” I answered her question in the calmest, politest and underexaggerating way possible.

“She’s out,” Paula replied in a more civil way.

“We didn’t even see anything,” Margaret added.

“Oh, I so much envy you,” I owed them an apology for being such a dick then. “What you mean she’s out?”

“She told us she needed to get out of the country for a couple of days to sort some banking thing,” Paula answered very defensively.

“That bitch,” I whispered this time.

Both heard me.

“But she told us to keep helping you with the vampire,” Margaret sealed their fate.

“Perfect,” I raised my voice masking my anger as conviction. “Do you have some small jars or something like it?”

Both nodded in silence.

“Bring them, and tell me where the fucking chapel is?”

***

After retrieving the miniscule amount of holy water that was available in the cozy and traditional chapel of this place that from outside appears to be disguised as just another staff quarter building, I divided it between the hunters. That left each one of us with one shot against the night creature we were up against.

Good news was that William had recovered, so I wasn’t having to do my guard alone. For the first inactive four hours, it did make a difference.

“Hey, man,” William stole my attention. “I was told about my transfusion on the medical unit. Thank you.”

“Save it,” I replied. “If we don’t get rid of this thing I don’t think I’ll have enough blood for the whole compound.”

Beat.

“And, sorry for not believing you at first.”

William’s sight dropped.

I placed my hand, the one without the stake, on his shoulder.

“Yeah, you were pretty shitty,” I tell him sincerely smiling. “Just don’t treat me like a dement guy anymore.”

“Of course.”

The chilling weather that was attacking us from all sides of the dark and deserted 4.00 a.m. Morlden Village was deadlier than the folklore-inaccurate vampire.

“He’s not coming.”

“What? How you know?” William questioned me.

“He knows we are hunting him…”

William stared at me confused.

“We need to go back to building E,” I finished.

***

Half an hour later, we were outside again. This time, William and I were hiding behind a big bush in the park that had almost a circular form perfectly fit to cover two grown ass men. And, out exposed, on the bench next to us, Mrs. Mitchell and Mr. Bunn, covered below ten layers of clothes and blankets to avoid them catching a cold, were having a romantic star watching session that we managed to convince both that they had asked us to set up.

My fellow hunter and I were cramping in almost fetal position. Mr. Bunn, as usual, was complaining about being uncomfortable and the night sky being boring. Ms. Mitchell was enjoying herself when not trying to convince his partner to stop talking shit.

Fortunately, after ten minutes, the big fish ate the bait.

“Sorry,” the familiar nightguard’s voice irrupted the scene. “What are you two love birds doing out here?”

“Freezing my ass,” Mr. Bunn replied.

“Don’t be like that, dear,” Mrs. Mitchell was a diplomat. “We’re just watching the stars. You like to join us?”

“I’ll be honored.”

The vampire sat next to the old couple on the bench. To their right. The only available space. Our air-tight planification let him on the closest side to the bush.

“Hey, you know on which building a lady named Marina lives?” The supposedly empathic monster questioned his interlocutors.

Mr. Bunn shook his head with despise.

“Sorry dear, never heard of her.”

Well, probably she had, but using cognitive held people as sources is not a reliable source.

“Oh, don’t worry at all. Did you already have a midnight snack?” The creature of darkness asked.

William tried standing up abruptly.

I held him in place.

“No,” was Mr. Bunn’s talkative answer.

“Not yet, dear,” Mrs. Mitchel was so sweet.

I almost felt bad for using her as bait.

“I have an idea,” the manipulative coffin-sleeper stated. “Close your eyes.”

Mr. Bunn of course just grunted and looked away.

Mrs. Mitchell complied.

I tapped on William’s arm.

The motherfucker opened his mouth up close to the old lady’s neck.

We left our hiding spot.

The teeth were just millimeters away from her skin.

William sprayed the two baby-food-size jars of holy water against the monster.

“What the fuck?!” Said the beast turning back at us.

It didn’t burn him as expected. The holy water just wetted and annoyed him.

Fuck it.

I jumped out of our plant trench with one stake in front of me.

The confused fucker reacted a couple of seconds late.

The pointy wooden weapon slashed his right arm as he attempted to get away.

A shriek of pain rumbled through the night.

A superhuman punch threw me 20 yards away through the air as if I was a football on Superbowl night.

The blood sucker swirled away into the shadows, again.

I slammed against the ground.

***

I was back again in my grandmother’s antique, almost in ruins, Victorian house. The outside permanent storm was flooding the wooden floors that were going to rot and break at any moment. The place seemed like a bedroom.

“Keep me company,” my grandmother’s voice hit my eardrums from behind me.

Her old and wrinkled body, that according to natural sciences shouldn’t be able to move anymore, was stronger and faster than mine.

She snatched my arm with boney unyielding fingers and pulled me with her to the bed.

Seven sheets cushioned my obliged descent into a sitting position.

“Grandma,” I told her trying to conceal my anger at her.

The bitch shushed me.

“I know you’re angry at me and I’m the last person you want to be dreaming about, but you’re in danger,” she took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there or you, but don’t make same mistakes I did.”

The storm wrecked the house.

***

I woke up in the medical unit. William, Paula and Margaret talking between them on the other side of the room. Carly, the overworked nurse, was checking my vitals.

I tried standing up.

Carly blocked my way.

“You need to rest,” she indicated me.

“I need to find Luke,” I said ignoring her.

“Shit, he lost his mind,” Paula laughed.

The three vampire hunters approached.

“Are Mr. Bunn and Mrs. Mitchell alright?” I asked William.

He nodded.

“It was really stupid using them as bait,” Paula stated the obvious.

“Yet it worked,” I replied proud of my plan.

“Did it?” Paula was being awfully sarcastic.

“The vampire is still on the loose,” Margaret also joined the point-the-obvious game.

I stood up to give more power to my words.

“Hey, capturing and killing a supernatural creature that doesn’t get affected by what legends and myths say is hard. I’m creating a new methodology on the spot. It’s like making a map without…”

A drop of blood splashed on the white and pristine floor under me.

My hand immediately retrieved to my chin. Blood kept dropping from it.

My three companions stared scared at me as if they hadn’t hunted demons just a couple of hours ago.

Carly pushed me back to my bed.

My motivational speech was so amazing the recently placed stitches over my chin injury popped out, letting the crimson waterfall run loose.

“What time is it?” I demanded to know.

Everyone looked at each other confused as if I had lost my mind and I was becoming a true patient of this place.

“What time?!”

“Around three past noon,” Margaret responded in the weirdest way to format a time.

“We need to get to the park where we ambushed him,” I declared.

***

“What are we doing here?” Paula asked that question for the seventh time in the ten minutes it took us to get from the medical building to this park.

I pointed to the place where my second encounter with the blood sucker took place.

“That’s what we’re doing here.”

A trail of blood. Not mine. My adversary fled with an arm injury. Which left us with the, even when undistinguishable at night, clue we desperately needed to follow during the day.

We tracked the blood spilling all the way across the Morlden Village. All the way to the North end. It led us to the supermarket.

“It isn’t here,” Paula was still very defensive.

“We searched the whole place and there was nothing,” Margaret clarified.

Beaten, I inspected the building which was our only hope. It couldn’t be.

“We need a ladder,” I indicated.

William, Paula and Margaret immediately understood. Margaret ran to the shed.

A couple of minutes later, the entire vampire hunter team was on the ceiling of the warehouse that was adapted as an old supermarket.

I encountered a denture that ended up here thanks to me. Decided to ignore it.

At the end of the ceiling, under the warm dusking sun, the bright red coffin waited for us.

“Fucking yes!” I screamed, almost popping my stitches again.

We four approached the coffin.

I was at the front, with a stake ready to pierce this bastard. I kneeled to get the best possible angle. Lifted my weapon up in the air. Opened the casket.

My hand stopped on half its trip down.

Inside the box was our creature, sleeping and vulnerable. His right arm had stopped bleeding, but that area of his coffin and clothes were a little soaked. What held my blow was a picture, an old photo showing an alive looking version of this guy hugging a woman of around his age.

“Why you stopped?” Paula just loved going after me.

“We can’t, this isn’t right,” I assured them. “No more violence.”

“Don’t bust my balls!” Paula was very aggressive.

“We can’t keep on replicating the same things that made him a threat.”

“Sure we can, just for once,” Paula was decided.

Margaret stopped her.

“Remember, Ms. Rowen told us to follow his lead on this.”

Paula stopped fighting.

“Thanks,” I told Margaret.

“So what do we do then?” William asked confused.

“We jail himself in the shed again?” Paula didn’t understand what was going on.

“No,” I replied. “We cannot just push this problem to others down the line. We need to give him what he’s been looking for.”

The other three looked at me confused.

“We need to find her,” I retrieved the picture from the coffin. “I believe her name is Marina.”

***

Twenty minutes later, Paula and I were using a rope from the shed and improvised pulleys to bring down the coffin from the supermarket roof.

Once the box was at ground level, Paula came down the stairs to tie the creature in his coffin, hoping that will make him stay in place at least a little.

From the top of the roof, I called Margaret (she had given me her number for this part of the operation).

“Have you found a match?” I asked her.

“Not yet.” She replied to me through the phone with the little breath her lungs were able to pull due to her racing task. “It’s not on building A B nor C.”

“Keep me posted.”

I hung up the call.

I started going down the stairs. Before the roof got out of my sight, I stopped. I realized that the supermarket was on the edge of the compound, meaning that if I jumped down on the other side, I would finally be outside. Free.

I contemplated the horizon for a couple of seconds. Luke came to mind.

“You’re helping with him?” Paula screamed at me from the street.

She was right.

“Yes.”

I continued going down the stairs.

Ring!

In the middle of my way down, my phone interrupted me.

Ring!

I answered the call.

“Found her,” William indicated through the other side of the phone.

“What took you so long?” I asked.

“It wasn’t in alphabetical order with the others. His file was at the end of the drawer. Was like if it was hidden to be difficult to find.”

I reached the ground level.

“Where is Marina living, then?”

“Building H,” William responded me.

“Thanks, I’ll let Margaret know.”

“Wait,” William prevented me from hanging. “There’s more.”

“Tell me in person, we’re in a hurry.”

I hung up the phone.

Almost dusk

Paula glared at me.

“Building H,” I told her.

She continued tying the guy.

The sun was coming down fast.

I called Margaret, again.

“Yes?” She answered.

“It’s on building H, get there.”

“On it,” she said before hanging on me.

The night flooded Morlden Village.

Our prisoner woke up.

“Wait,” I yelled at him before his supernatural force broke the rope. “We know where she is.”

Paula looked at the scene with a stake up, ready to fall it on this guy.

The vampire stared at me, doubting my words.

“Marina, we know where she is,” I repeated to convince him. “Resident building H.”

He broke the ropes and stood up. Not violently, calm and cooperative. Still imposing.

“I don’t know if you need permission to enter to a building,” I continued. “We got someone on her way there to help you enter.”

The creature smirked and flew towards that address with superhuman speed.

I called Margaret again, as Paula and I followed the vampire at normal human speed.

“He’s going your way,” I told Margaret as soon as she answered.

“Already let him in,” she indicated me. “But there is something you need to know. She’s in a coma.”

Fuck.

***

Paula and I arrived at Marina’s room a couple of minutes before William, but many after the vampire. Margaret was already looking at the scene.

“She is so old, and hasn’t gotten out of the coma yet,” The vampire indicated me as soon as I arrived.

The room, with Marina in the bed, felt more like a museum than a living person’s quarters. Of course, she didn’t use anything in that place. Everything was just decorative. Such perfection, instead of being creepy as in the rest of this place, here was sad.

“I accepted to become this… to be able to find her when she will have gotten out of this state,” the blood sucker continued. “But she has just been in pain for so long.”

He kneeled at the side of the bed. Margaret, Paula and I, with William as soon as he arrived, just stared in silence.

“I’m sorry,” the monster begged with tears in his eyes to the unconscious Marina.

He disconnected the device that was keeping her alive.

Margaret and William looked away.

The beeping sound intensified a little before flatlining.

The demon we had been fighting for multiple nights stood up and with all the patience in the world approached us.

“Thank you,” he said as he extended his arm.

Paula gave him, without complaining (which was something new to her), the stake.

The guy grabbed it before returning to the middle of the room.

This time the four of us looked away.

***

Four hours later, we finished burying them in the village’s graveyard. We just had a single burial, with both bodies cramped together in the bright red coffin that had been a prison for so long but now was a resting place.

Around midnight, Paula and Margaret went back to their chambers to sleep.

“So, what’s what you wanted to tell me?” I asked William as soon as we were left alone.

“Not know what of it is important anymore,” he replied. “But the record said that he was the one who interned her here under an induced coma. Apparently, the manager at that time, told him that could work to cure the cognitive detriment.”

“So, he was tricked?”

“Not only that, but the manager at that time was also a Mrs. Rowen.”

“The one who died when I first arrived here?”

“No,” William sounded very confident in what he was saying. “This happened more than fifty years ago, it was another Mrs. Rowen.”

“Meaning…”

I wasn’t quite following his train of thought.

“I checked all the handwritten patient names in the folders,” he continued. “No matter how old or new they are, all have a very similar written letter. So similar it seems they were written by the same person.”

I knew where he was going.

“All written by one Mrs. Rowen,” I concluded his idea.

William nodded, scared.

“We’ll deal with it tomorrow,” I assured him. “Right now, just go rest.”

William continued nodding as he left the small cemetery. I stayed a couple of extra seconds.

“Luke,” I said to the darkness the leaves-less trees casted upon the terrifying place. “If you hear me, I’m sorry.”

After not getting any answer, I went to sleep.