Nowhither left to run

It took many inquiries and almost as many refusals, to manage an interview with Dr Elias McKinley of the Sratsnav Hospital. I had to perpetually use the words “Marlow Gazette” like a crucifix towards the security guards, who would not let me get closer to the doctor. He was engaged, after breakfast, in his study regulating his documentation, which, due to the recent events at the hospital being so strenuous and requiring attention at all times, had fallen into arrear. He looked, I must admit, unhappy to see me.

‘I told them I was not interested in meeting anyone. Did the guards not stop you?’
‘They tried,’ I said walking in, ‘but gave in when I insisted. Especially when I showed them a permission slip given to me by your colleague Dr Jozef.’

He looked at me with an expression of confusion.

‘You! Are you the reporter from Marlow?”

I confess I was delighted at the reaction. The name I have made for myself in recent times has been making a bold man out of me at every turn, though it wouldn’t hurt to keep my attitude in check for he saw my nose get longer with pride and looked more annoyed than glad to see me.

‘Ask away.’, he said, with an air of disinterest as he sat back in his chair with his back towards me, staring out of the window with a lit cigar in his long fingers. I sat down on the chair and pulled out the typewriter from my bag, ready to take his side of the story.

‘May I please know everything that happened, starting from the beginning of course!’. He tilted his head to the side and after a pause, began to speak. Below is a copy of everything he said as I recorded it at the time:

“Had to call at the emergency room early and found Jozef, as usual, ready on time. The carriage that we ordered from the hostel was waiting right outside. Jozef took his bag, which he always brings with him, and- Let me put down exactly what happened for your easy understanding. This all began three
days ago. Jozef and I arrived at the hospital at seven o’clock. It was a lovely morning, the fresh feeling of early autumn seemed heavenly. The leaves outside my study’s window were turning to many different beautiful colours. As we came in, we were surprised to see Katarina, for she is always a late riser. She greeted us and walked on into the reception area, where she always works. We made our rounds with the patients and went straight into the
morgue where the autopsy of the woman- Zuzana Varga, was to take place. She was on clerical duties at the Bank of Sratsnav but was found dead in her apartment when she didn’t show up to work for many days and her colleague went in to check up on her. A woman with no family to report to, we were instructed by the police to check her for any possibilities of murder. There were none, she was a clear case of self-overdose and suicide. Took way too
many pills for her own good and then probably had an overreaction when her senses must have been dialled to a hundred. From what I could tell, she had cut off her own ears and even gouged out her eyes because she had been hallucinating and hearing things hundreds of times clearer and louder than usual. So much sensory overload can be extremely painful. We wanted to simply write it off as an overdose, but when the police insisted on a more detailed autopsy, we went ahead and showed up early in the morning to do so.
Something seemed suspicious as we entered the morgue. The room was unusually cold, colder than it should be. Jozef took out the key from his bag and opened the locker in which Varga was kept. The locker opened and when I looked at her body on the stretcher, the same frail and pale body that looked as dead as can be, her face was painful to look at, but something seemed different from before. As expected, there were no eyes and no ears. But her throat was bluish in colour. It was clogged with vomit before we had removed it the day before. The rest of the body was looking crimson and purple in different places, creating a blotchy pattern. That is because after six to twelve hours, victims’ blood pools and settles in whatever position they died in. However, in her case, the patterns had moved from their original positions. We began the procedure, Jozef and me. We checked up on everything we could. Again, the same result, even after noting down all the details. She had definitely killed herself in an overdosed state, that we were sure of, but what could be the reason for the patterns altering their positions? We could not tell. The only reason something like that would happen is if the blood inside had moved after death, which is impossible. You may have heard that corpses don’t bleed. That is because the heart needs to be beating for the blood to move. But in this case, the body looked as if it had been drained of whatever blood was left. And only clots remained. Small rare and solid clots of blood that created patches. But since we could not determine the reason for the change in patterns, we thought it may have been an error on our side the day before. We simply noted down the details and cleaned up after us. We went back to the emergency room, they needed some extra hands because a difficult case was at hand. After that was done away with, we went to the police station and told them about the results of the autopsy. They did not seem much satisfied but took them anyway.

All of this happened a few days ago. Now to get to the actual horrors we have been going through ever since. We thought the case was open and shut, that there was no way something else could possibly come up and trouble us with this. We see death every day and you may call us cold, but that is what we become after years of practising. I am forty-two and I can tell you that while it does not get easier, we do become somewhat numb to it, eventually. Even in
England, it was the same for me. I work closely with Jozef, as he might be very old but he is reliable. I was making rounds with the patients and helping the residents as well as I could when one of the patients began to act strangely. He was an old farmer from the country who had been with us for a month. A nice fellow with two daughters and a compassionate and kind heart to keep him afloat in the sea of chaos that we call life. He had never given us trouble before. After we had dealt with his stomach problems, we were going to discharge him sooner than later.

The episodes were strange. He was acting as if he was seeing someone or something in thin air. He would stop nurses and point at walls and ask if they saw something there. They didn’t so he would nervously smile and say ‘Okay…I must be getting old.’ and would go back to sleep. As I told you already, I was making my rounds and one such episode happened right in
front of me, but it was a lot more violent and shook my nerves to the very core. He jumped up and screamed, ‘It is there! By my right hand to God! It is right there. Do you not see it? Oh, please tell me you see it too! It is moving! It has been watching me. It goes with me everywhere. When I go to the bathroom and when I go to the canteen!’

Hallucinations are not common with people who simply have stomach ulcer problems. But here we were, re-evaluating his case. His daughters were both worried. They were just teenagers so I felt bad for them, having to see their father go through so much. This kept happening throughout the day. He tried to escape in the middle of the night. I was arranging my documentation in the study. When the attendants came running into the room and begged me frantically to help them lest they may lose their jobs. I followed them and grabbed hold of the man who had jumped past the fence and run to the other side of the fields, reaching the small bridge. He begged us to not stop him. He was wailing as we forced him up. ‘It will get me, you don’t understand. I see it but you don’t! I hear its whispers. Oh, those were in the most horrible tongues of them all. Some monstrosity! Oh, those eyes! That cunning… I beg of you let me go!’

The nurses pushed and pulled until suddenly, his demeanour changed. He became as quiet as can be and started staring in horror at the air behind us. I turned around and saw nothing, just lights turning on in the houses in the distance, probably people waking up due to the commotion we had caused. The old man wouldn’t say anything anymore. We dragged him a bit but then he got up obediently and started walking with us without any more quarrelling. After we entered the hospital and climbed the stairs, I took him
by arm and helped him get back to bed, with the attendants resuming their duties.

‘So there is nowhither left to run.’

I was almost startled for there was such silence before that moment, that I hardly expected him to speak if at all. I asked him what he meant and why he wants to run away so bad, but he simply shook his head as he turned his back to me and lay there, as still as a corpse. The next morning I came over to check up on him and found the nurses sobbing. I asked around and tried to get as much information as possible. The old man had passed in his sleep. The nurses were trying to comfort the daughters who were wailing in sorrow.”

I was startled. I couldn’t type anymore for my hands had begun to tremble. I asked him how and why such a horrible thing could happen. He had been trying to retain his composure whilst speaking of the poor man. He simply shook his head as if saying, ‘I don’t know,’ and then continued to speak as I tried my best to continue typing:
“That evening, I went to look at his body as we needed to help cleanup the wounds as best as we could and make the body look better for the funeral. I noticed the botchy patterns all over it. While I examining and writing down the details Jozef, who was cleaning the wounds suddenly jumped. I looked at him and then the body. ‘Did you see that?’, he exclaimed as loud as he could while being out of breathe. I looked at the body, the patterns were moving. Slowly but surely, the clotted blood inside was moving downwards. I told Jozef it might just be that the temperature change in the room was causing the blood to liquefy and fall downwards due to gravity, although that makes no sense now that I think about it. The room temperature was not much different for other corpses and blood doesn’t just move around randomly like that. I guess I was too surprised to think of it. When we were done, we decided to put the body back in the refrigeration cell, but it felt as if the body had lost a lot more mass while we were cleaning it up. Almost as if it was drained of any blood left in it. We were, however, in no mood to stick around longer than we had to, so we simply cleaned up and left quietly. That same night I was reading in my study and heard a doctor call out my name, I ran over to look at what was happening and saw that one of our patients was running away from the hospital. She must have been thirty. We did not know much about her except that she had an allergic reaction to some food and had been in the hospital for a week. As we came closer, we grabbed her and helped her back to the hospital. She begged us not to stop her. But we had to bring her back. As we put her in bed, she whispered slowly to me, ‘Doctor, please know this. There is something unholy about this place. It makes my blood curdle. I see and hear something I don’t want to see, I don’t want to hear!’
I was taken aback. I asked her what she meant but she didn’t say anything. She looked scared of the room. She didn’t want to be left alone. She just kept staring at the wall. Tears welled up in her eyes. She sobbed for a few minutes and then quietly turned her back towards me. Then she drifted away into sleep. I was a little concerned now. I wondered if there could be some new form of a disease? Something that could cause hallucinations, perhaps. I went back to my room and went to sleep, for I was very tired, but dreamt the most horrible nightmares, none of which I can recall anymore, but I am glad I
can’t. The next morning I checked up on the woman, she was still asleep. I looked around the room. There seemed nothing unusual about it. The windows were open and the view outside was lovely. I looked at the wall and it seemed normal as well. I went back to attend to my duties and Jozef and I went to get lunch together afterwards. He told me that he talked to Katarina recently and she said she had been having nightmares. She was always a sound sleeper and a late riser, but in recent days, she has had trouble falling
asleep and would wake up earlier than usual. I felt a chill go down my spine when I heard that. When we came back to the hospital, Katarina was waiting for us. She told us that the woman from last night had been begging to leave. The nurses had just calmed her down. We checked up on her later and she was mumbling in her sleep. What she said I couldn’t make out but it sounded something like a prayer. She had forced the nursed to wrap bandages around her eyes and ears. I looked at Jozef and he looked equally concerned.

That night we went down to the police station to tell them the story. The police had already attended to the case and started to work on the situation. After hearing our accounts, one of the officers, produced a diary, from late Miss Varga. ‘This diary has similar accounts,’ he said, ‘ It talks about some hallucinations and a fiend that she was seeing every day when she went to work. We thought she was writing some kind of a story, perhaps keeping records of her dreams. We have seen things like that before haven’t we doctor? Mentally ill people often have such hallucinations, it might be some disease, perhaps?’ There was a crucifix hanging from his neck and I just kept staring at it while he spoke.”

At this point, I stopped writing on my typewriter and frowned. ‘What could it possibly be? Surely you do not believe in demons or such? Why?’ He stood up from his chair, taking one last puff from the cigar before discarding it onto his ashtray, in the window. He turned the chair around and faced me. His face was dull and stern.

‘A disease in which people have hallucinations is entirely possible. In fact, many such problems already exist. But a disease in which three different people had the same hallucination? What are the odds? All three of them are not connected in any way.’ I looked at him with awe and confusion. He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the wall and began to speak again:
“As I came back to the hospital with Jozef, he went back to the hostel and slept for some time, for it was late at night. I stayed at the hospital and reporters were constantly bugging me for information regarding the recent deaths at the hospital. Christian missionaries and the local vicar were also present. They wanted to see the patients. The guards didn’t let them. I went to check up on Katarina who was looking frail and dull. Her eyes had begun to show signs of her sleeplessness. She started talking to me with a monotonous voice, about how she had been seeing strange figures in her dreams, hearing languages she didn’t understand and was scared of going to sleep. I was concerned for her so I asked her to take a few days off. She smiled and nodded, saying she had to go upstairs to arrange some documentation from a doctor. After that, she left. I went back to the study to read. The very next morning, that is yesterday at around nine o’clock, I drove to the hospital with Jozef. Upon reaching we all heard the news, the woman from before had passed away. The cause of her death was unknown. It seemed like as if her heart had simply stopped beating. She was too young to have had a heart attack. But that is all I could write on her death certificate. One of the doctors from another hospital was visiting to pick up some books from my study. I had him come down and help with the autopsy. We noticed it again. This time for sure. The botchy patterns were moving. the woman’s body was as dead as can be. But her blood was disappearing as it moved around in the body. Disappearing into nothingness!”

As Dr McKinley spoke, I watched his face turn grey. He raised his hands over his head and then beat his palms on the table in a sort of mute despair. Finally, putting his hands before his face, he began to sob. His cries seemed to come from the very depths of his heart.

‘God! God!’, he said. ‘What have we done to deserve this punishment?’

‘What happened next, doctor?’ I inquired, interrupting him almost shamelessly. He rubbed his face and looked up at me, then he looked behind me and his eyes seemed to widen.

A horror came on his face as such I had never seen before. He leaned back in his chair and didn’t blink for half a minute. I thought there might be someone or something behind me, so I turned. Nothing. There was nothing strange about the room. It was all the same. I turned back to the doctor who was now smiling. A desperate smile, like one from a man whistling as he walks through a graveyard, trying to merry himself and distracts from the fears of the dead
and of the night.

‘Nothing of interest happened after that,’ he said, breaking the minute-long silence, “I came down here to my study again. I have been saying no to reporters since yesterday, but they don’t stop bothering me. I sat here all of last night until morning came. Then you did. But I must fret not anymore. As I sat here since morning, hoping to not be troubled by reporters and inquests. Yet I am giving you the accounts. I am simply awaiting my turn. It seems I don’t have to wait long after all. You may leave now.’

I was about to interject for I was confused. But I couldn’t speak as there was a commotion outside and the door burst open, with the attendants sobbing, one of them looked at me and then looked at the doctor. ‘Doctor, we need you in the emergency room. Miss Katarina is bleeding! She gouged out her eyes and stabbed her ears. Please be quick.”

This came as a shock to me but it didn’t seem to stir the doctor too much. He looked as if what he had been waiting for had finally happened. He got up from his chair as the attendants left. I was asked to leave as well so I got up too. I packed my things and said to the doctor that I may have to come back and ask a few more questions. He smiled anxiously and looked at the wall behind me with a focused expression, ‘It may not happen. The world as we know it, is about to change completely.’

With a desperate smile on his face, he ran out to the emergency room. After he had left, I looked at the wall for a few seconds and felt as if the room was growing colder, then I walked out.