Halloween Horror Special 2013 part 2
She Will Come
The hospital room was an absolute mess: for starters, the window was shattered, the curtains were ripped and draped over all the monitoring equipment, the bed was turned on its side, the bathroom door had been ripped off its hinges, and the TV wasn't working. When Charles's nurse first discovered the mess, she was stunned, and just stood there looking it for a few minutes until she called hospital's police. When they finally got up to the room, they discovered the young boy Charles huddled in a corner, shaking, speechless, pale... they tried to evoke a response for him, but even after an hour, he had said absolutely nothing. Then, during the middle of the night, he began speaking, although as if to himself. The night watchman called everybody over, and they listened to what the boy said, listening intently for the answers to their questions: where was the boy's father? What had happened? What caused the destruction? Soon, they would find out, but would they be ready for the answer?
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You could say that the events leading up to the disaster started on October twenty-ninth, but then again, that would not be the whole story... in fact, the tale actually began on the twenty-fifth of October. If one wanted to go further, they could say that the events started on October seventeenth of the year 2002, when young Charles was born. But, to keep the length of our story reasonable, we shall start on October thirteenth of the year 2006.
Charles's parents were Bernie and Victoria Hunston; for them, October was a wonderful month. It was the month when they had met, the month when they had married, and, most importantly to them, a time of new beginnings; thus, every one of their friends and relatives thought it was fitting when their only son Charles was born in October. In a tragic way, Charles was a new beginning for the couple... most certainly not one they had expected, and most certainly not a happy one. From birth, Charles was a very sickly child: doctors fought to keep him alive so he would hopefully grow stronger, and try to find out what exactly was wrong with Charles.
Thus it was that, on the night of October thirteenth, 2006, Bernie and Victoria Hunston were engaged in a vicious argument, over Charles, of all people...
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"You've stopped caring about Charles!" Victoria yelled at Bernie, "you've stopped caring about me!"
"Yeah, so I'm at work half the day! We have medical bills to pay! I don't see you doing much else either!"
"Well at least I'm concerned about him!"
"How can you accuse me of not caring!?!?"
And their loud "discussion" continued on for more than a half hour; it escalated even to physical violence, and, at the end, Victoria demanded that Bernie leave, or else she would call the police; he had no choice but to leave, still bitter over their argument, and the accusations she had hurled at him. Every day from then until the twentieth, Bernie called Victoria; the only time she answered, she renewed her threat to call the police if he came near her. Then, from the twentieth on, Bernie plotted... disgruntled and crazed, he searched across the city... for a hitman... no insurance policy, no discernible motive- nobody knew about the events of the previous week. The hitman would attack Victoria as she was running her daily errands, kill her, and take her purse- make it look like an ordinary mugging. Then the hitman would get in his car and drive off to avoid detection.
On October twenty-ninth, 2006, Victoria Hunston was robbed and murdered; the unknown assailant drove off and was lost in traffic before anybody noticed him. His journey took him far north; for several weeks, however, he was delayed, and by the time he was nearing his destination, snow had already started to fall... when crossing a bridge, his car skidded on ice and crashed through the flimsy guard railing, and into the icy river below. Nobody would ever know what he had done- the plot he had partaken in- except for the man who hired him. In the wake of Victoria's death, Bernie became the sole caretaker of Charles; it seemed like Bernie forgot Victoria's death quickly, something that caused murmurings among his relatives...
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Aside from the usual, nothing of significant happened in the lives of Charles and Bernie Hunston until the day of October the twenty-fifth, 2013. That was the day that Charles came down with a terrible case of pneumonia, and the day his father had to take him to the hospital for treatment and more observation.
On the twenty-sixth of October, everything was normal. Bernie read to his child throughout the day as Charles coughed and wheezed; by the end of the day, Bernie was feeling well enough about his son's care that he left the hospital room for a few minutes to go walk around and talk to some friends. During this brief time, something did happen: someone unexpected entered Charles's room to pay him a visit. People who saw her in the hall couldn't describe her features very well, but called her a "shrouded woman," with "long, dark, flowing hair." She was apparently in the room for quite some time, and when Charles was awake, but he never mentioned to anybody about who she was or why she was there, and for some reason, nobody else did either, until after the disaster in the room.
On the twenty-seventh of October, Bernie heard something that unnerved him.
"She will come, she will come," Charles whispered.
"Who?" Bernie asked, in a quiet voice.
"She," Charles repeated.
********************
The year before; twenty-fifth of October, 2012. Charles was playing out in the backyard of his family's house; the sun was starting to set.
"Dinner will be ready soon, Charlie," his father called from inside, "do you want to come in now?"
Charles saw something through the fence, and wasn't paying attention to what his father had said. After his father repeated his statement, Charles responded: "'Yeah, in a minute dad..."
He walked up to the fence and looked through; he jumped back and gasped when he saw somebody on the other side, trying to reach through.
"Charlie my boy... Charlie... come here..." a woman's voice spoke to him.
He turned around and ran toward the house, calling for his father. Upon investigating the spot where Charles saw the woman, he found a pair of earrings that had dropped on the ground; he picked them up and, getting a closer look at them, shuddered.
"It's nothing Charlie; it's all right..."
********************
The twenty-eighth of October was uneventful; not even the woman from the previous night appeared. However, Charles seemed uncomfortable, for some reason, as if he was expecting something to happen soon, but when his father asked him what was wrong, he said that nothing was wrong. He refused to eat that night, saying that he felt queasy. The night went well.
The next day, the twenty-ninth of October, Bernie awoke earlier than usual. He decided to leave his son alone for a bit and walk around. After he circled around the floor of the hospital a few times, he decided to go back to Charles's room. He tried to go back along the route he had been traveling before, but he quickly got lost; he stopped to get his bearings, and while he wasn't moving, he saw a woman walking slowly along the hall, away from him. He ran toward her to ask for directions, but she turned around, stared at him, then started running away.
"Hey, wait!" he said to her, "I need to know where my son's room is! I'm lost!"
He heard laughter, and when he was running out of breath, the woman got ahead of him and turned around a corner. When he finally caught up, he saw a woman in a hospital gown, lying on the floor, limp. He reached out to check her pulse, and found that she was dead.
"Oh no," he whispered under his breath.
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Bernie ran to the room, but he was so lost that he was too late by the time he had entered. He saw another woman, standing over the bed, looking at Charles. She didn't look like his wife, but for some reason, he knew it was her.
"I'm the one you want; don't hurt him."
"Yes, that's right," the chilling voice called out to him; he knew it was her, "I'm here to take you over; now, will you come willingly?"
"There has to be somebody to take care of Charlie."
"Someone better than you."
"I made a mistake."
"Yes you did. A fatal one, for me and for you." She leaped at him.
********************
"There's something wrong with that boy; I think he was really affected by whatever happened in there," the officer stated as he was walking out of the building, talking to the boy's doctor, "I'm afraid we'll never know what really happened in there."
The officer left the building; he saw a dropped cup on the ground, and went over to it, picking it up and placing it in the trash can. He looked up, and saw something in the bushes- or, rather, something wrong with the bushes. He got out his flashlight and turned it on: in the bushes were two bodies- one of a man and another of a woman in a hospital gown; the woman had a choke hold on the man. For some reason, he decided to look back up at the hospital. Almost directly above, he saw a broken window.
STAY TUNED FOR PART 3: THE TALE OF DR. GOODE
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Topic: BlackDragonSlayer's Short Stories (Read 76320 times)