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In last week's newsletter, esprit  asked, Where has all the imagination gone?
I can relate to that question because it's something I continually deal with while writing. I keep asking myself if this-or-that idea is 'fresh', 'new', 'imaginative'.
Well, is it?
How do we know?
There are so many horror writers out there, how do we know two people haven't come up with the exact same idea?
We don't. But we still try to be original.
Anyway, in my attempt to be fresh and innovative, I am offering part of a story I've been banging out for the last several months.
It's about Nursing Homes.
 Ooooo...scary!
Yeah, well if it were you in this home, you'd be very, very scared.
Everybody knows that nursing homes are the pits anyway. But I don't think anyone has come up with a story like this. Give it a read and tell me whatcha think. It's not finished and I'm not going to give away the ending, but it should be done soon.
It's called,
The Home
The last place Bob ever thought he’d end up was in a nursing home.
Hell, he felt as fit as a fiddle. Well, as fit as any seventy-year-old fiddle could feel. Sure, he had his aches and pains, but what old geezer his age didn’t? If it hadn’t been for that stupid lap-dog of Rose’s jumping up on him, he never would have fallen and busted his kneecap, and he certainly wouldn’t have ended up in this Hell Hole.
It was the last place on earth Bob ever wanted to come back to.
It was here that his Rose died, and when he lost her, he thought for a time that he’d lost everything that was worth living for. His shoulders slumped, his gait slowed, and he only cried on the inside where it felt safe to cry. And it wasn’t the first time he looked more dejected than angry at what God had taken from him. It was as if he decided—perhaps on a subconscious level—to give up the fight. One thing was for sure, her death made him painfully aware that everything was temporary—everything but that damn dog.
Rose loved the mutt—God knows why—always jumping up on everybody. That’s how the dog tripped him.
Bob had gotten up from the small kitchen table, after his usual coffee and cigarette, just like he and Rose used to do every morning. There’s a kind of routine, a ritual of sorts that old folks tend to develop after living with each other for so many years. For Bob and Rose, it was sharing that first cup of coffee in the morning. He figured there was no reason to stop now just because she was gone. Besides, it gave him time to think about the old times—to think about her. Except now, that warm smile of his dearest companion, that faint scent of lilac he used to smell when she greeted him, was gone. There was nothing left but the aches and pains of old age and Winston, running in-between his legs and tripping him.
Bob struggled with her death for two years, always remembering the night Rose died, always recalling with dread that something inexplicably strange had happened—something worse than frightening—something terrifying. In the back of his mind, a voice kept telling him it wasn’t natural—when people die it’s not supposed to be like that. And as that thought—that voice—rose to the surface, it filled him with a icy chill. Even now, a shiver passed through him from head to toe, and he felt an eerie sense of precognition. Then it was gone as quickly as it had come, like a dream you can’t quite believe or remember. But it kept him wary—ever watchful—prepared for death to come at anytime and to always expect it when your back is turned.
It was all Winston’s fault.
Bob blamed it on the dog.
He bought the mutt for Rose at the local animal shelter right when she was getting real bad. She had always wanted a dog, but Bob had been immovable knowing that he’d be the one that’d have to take care of it—have to cleanup after its little poo-poos in the far corners of the house. But he finally gave in because Rose meant everything to him—everything. And of course, she loved the dog right-off and named him Winston, because that’s what brand she used to smoke, and because that’s what the doctors said was killing her and that she could never smoke again.
Winston tripped old Bob as it jumped and ran in-between his legs, begging for that morning walk. The next thing Bob knew, he was toppling forward and coming down hard on his knee. He felt it go, exploding beneath him like a ripe melon, his head cracking into the corner of the coffee table hard enough to make him see a wheel of stars roll across his vision. A wave of sickening numbness washed over him, and rolling onto his back, he cradled his kneecap and sucked air between clenched teeth. “Damn dog!” was all he could say. “Damn, damn, DAMN DOG!”
When he looked down at his knee, he saw a splinter of bone sticking out through his white skin. Surprisingly, the pain was bearable, only because his body was going numb. A cool tingle coursed through him from head to toe. He wanted to close his eyes. Sleep a little. Dream a little dream: green pastures, wildflowers, a blue sky, and Rose.
When he came to he was in an ambulance. His neighbor had found him on the floor with the damn dog licking at his face.
He spent two weeks in the hospital to set it right, and after a major knee replacement, Doc Thornton said he’d definitely need daily therapy before he could walk again, and that he’d more than likely carry a limp for the rest of his life. But that was fine with Bob, he could deal with that. But it was the goddamn nursing home he hated—the place where his Rose had died. In a way, it was ironic, but that didn’t make things any easier—only harder—and he thought about her and what happened there more than ever.
A fat Mexican nurse wheeled him into his room. There were two beds, each one sectioned off by one of those wrap-around curtains that hung from metal rings and slid noisily along an oval steel track stationed above the bed. As the nurse painfully transferred him from the wheelchair to his bed, Bob noticed the old lady in the bed next to his.
She was an odd bird, who watched him intently from behind her sheets that she had pulled up to her eyes concealing most of her face. It was as if she were terribly modest, or afraid of something—like a child peeping out over the covers when awakened from a bad dream. Bob gave her a friendly nod and tried to smile, but she held those covers tight to her face and snarled. He figured if looks could kill, he’d be withering on the floor right then. There was something strange about her eyes, something there wasn’t a word for—like a yearning—a hunger.
“There you go, Mr. Heider,” the overweight nurse said as she tucked him in. “Just relax and get some rest.”
“But I ain’t tired.”
“You will be. Once the swelling goes down and we start your therapy. Then you’ll wish you had never met me.”
“If it can get me out of here any quicker, then we can start now.”
“All in good time,” she laughed. “We’ll bring you dinner in a couple of hours.
“Thanks, Maria,” Bob said, reading the name tag that was pinned to her over-sized breasts.
Bob glanced over again at the woman in the bed next to him. She still had the covers tight over her face peeking over the top with enraged eyes. Why is she doing that?
His staring sharpened her gaze, turned her glare into a collection of knives. And her eyes…eyes like a deep sable gloom at the end of a hallway that wouldn’t yield its secrets—those eyes.
“What’s her problem?” he whispered to the nurse.
“Who?”
Bob hitched his head toward the other bed. “My roommate over there. Why’s she hiding behind her sheets?”
“What…?” Startled, she looked around the room, and then crossed herself like you see the Catholics do sometimes when they want to ward off some kind of evil or another. “You got this whole room to yourself,” she said as she finished tucking him in. “Now, doesn’t that make you feel special?”
Bob turned his head and looked over at the other bed. It was empty and neatly made. “Well, don’t that beat all. I could have sworn….”
“It’s probably just your medication,” she said, but her eyes betrayed her fear. “Get some rest.” Then quickly turning, Rosa was out the door moving faster than Bob would have thought for a woman her size.
He looked hesitantly back at the empty bed, shook the cobwebs out of his head, and took a deep breath.
The Home literally stunk. It smelled of urine and shit, and fear mostly—fear of dying. Hell, it was where they all came to die. There was nothing for it. Where else could they go?
Most of them drifted off to Dream Land, doped up on some weird combination of pills or another, and becoming more and more senile. It was sad really. He could hear them moaning and groaning, calling for a son or daughter that probably would never come.
It was no way to die—just lying around shitting on yourself and waiting for someone to come and take you home. But of course the kids would never come, and pretty soon the old farts just kind of lost their place in life—like a bookmark that has fallen out of a book. And after awhile, what they were yelling about became more and more unintelligibly: a moaning kind of sound, like a person whose forgotten how to speak.
Bob supposed it was all part of the journey, one foot stepping closer to the grave, while the other lay chaffed and bleeding against freshly peed sheets.
It was no way to die. No damn way at all.
Nursing Homes are crowded with women. At least, that is the statistical average. Men just never seem to last that long once everything has been taken from them and they’re put away. They become cantankerous and stubborn: too mulish to eat, and too damn ornery and pissed-off to go out without a fight.
People die hard, Bob thought. The myth he once believed about folks just closing their eyes and falling to sleep was really nothing more than that—a myth. It wasn’t like in the movies: where God reached softly down and gathered them into His arms.
Hell no.
It was more like a dramatic wrenching and tearing away of the soul—a battle. People die hard because they don’t want to die; they fight for every breath, every minute…every second.
Just like Rose.
He came to see her everyday at the Home still feeling guilty about putting her there. She just laid there in bed with that stench-ridden cancer eating away at her vitals with a ravenous hunger: never talking, never showing any pain, and never forgiving him.
Bob still remembered the first time she took a fall. She made him promise right then (as if she knew what was coming) never to send her to a nursing home.
He struggled to get her up off the floor, and then promised to keep her with him no matter what. But even then, he knew it was a lie.
Days later, she had taken another fall, and then another, the last one breaking her hip with a loud sickening pop. He called an ambulance, and then just let things slip out of his control. He knew they would. He was too inexperienced to take care of her anymore without her worse than she already was. Then the doctors made the decision he was unable to make. But he let it happen.
They sent her to Sunnyvale Manor, the nearest nursing home in the area. She gave Bob a funny kind of look when they took her away, a look he will never forget. The look on her face was filled with a disbelieving hurt, her eyes full of mistrust. Bob said his guilt-ridden goodbyes, but she never spoke to him after that until the night she died. All he could do was hang his head as they drove her away. He knew he had betrayed her.
Rose didn’t last long—a month, maybe. Bob was there at her side when she finally spoke to him again.
“Bob, please…please get me out of here,” she said suddenly, her voice thick and throaty, panic swimming in her eyes and lapping at the edges of her face.
“What?” he asked startled. “But…but, Rose, you’re sick—real sick.”
“Listen to me,” she insisted. Her eyes had taken on a focus that Bob had not seen in weeks and demanded that she be heard. “There’s something not right here," she mumbled. “There's ghosts."
She tried to swallow before going on. “Everybody knows about them. They're everywhere..." Her head fell back into the pillow as she gasped for air.
Bob could see her intensity slipping.
“Rose, I don’t understand…”
“They're here!” Rose clutched his arm with amazing strength. “Everybody’s afraid! I'm afraid...”
“But Rose...that's nonsense..."
“Everybody that's ever come here dies!” She grimaced and closed her eyes until a wave of pain passed.”
“But everybody dies. I don’t see how….”
Rose’s eyes shot open. “But they don't leave! They're still here—hanging on. They're always here. Always! Please…Bob...please...take me home.”
An unbearable coughing spasm shook through her that Bob felt powerless to do anything about. The thought ate at him with cruel teeth.
From out of nowhere an unexplained wind blew through the room. Bob smelled it: a nauseating odor, sour and putrescent beyond anything he had ever smelled before.
Then suddenly, violently, Rose arched her back upward as if she were being lifted by the waist, her head and feet still touching the bed. Bob watched in horror as an invisible force seemed to hold her up like some ghostly lover even though every muscle in her body strained to push it away. There was a terrible licking sound like a bear lapping at the last bit of honey from the bottom of a deep jar. Rose thrashed her arms and legs.
Bob shot to his feet. “Nurse! Nurse!” he screamed.
Then Rose collapsed back to the bed like a doll that has been thrown to the floor never to be played with again…and was gone.
Bob stood there stunned, awash in horror, drowning in cold currents that robbed his breath and left him gasping. His wife lay upon the bed broken and lifeless. She looked innocent. All her life, she had loved and given of herself to others. Now death, unimpressed with her selfless giving, had cruelly taken all that was left.
The wind stirred the room again and someone unseen whispered in his ear.
“Behold the rotting corpse that she will eventually become.”
Bob jumped from the bedside, fear gripping his mind, his stomach.
”No doubt the worms will be awake and waiting.”
He cried out, startled, trying to look in all directions at once.
The nurse rushed in. “What is it? What has happened?” She looked down at Rose, and then gently lifted her arm and checked for a pulse. “She’s gone, Mr. Heider. It’s all over,” she said with a canned and well-practiced sadness upon her face.
To Bob, Rose looked as if her exact likeness had been set in wax. Her skin, almost translucent, appeared penciled with small blue veins like the map of a major metropolis. Behold the rotting corpse that she will eventually become.
The nurse stepped in front of him, breaking the spell, and pulled the sheet up. Though she gave it a firm tug, she was unable to pull it completely over her head. It stopped just below her eyes.
He sat down beside his dead wife, and then leaned over and put his head on the white sheet that covered her breast.
He didn’t want to cry, but did anyway.
And that was it.
Bob lay back on his pillow, dismissing the memories, and hating the nursing home.
He looked out the window at the far end of the room. The evening sky was drenched in that peculiar California light that is perfectly clear but that seems at the same time to have considerable substance.
When the nurse arrived with dinner, Bob could smell the hot food even before she opened the lid to the tray. “Here you go, Mr. Heider. We made a nice hamburger for you.”
She set the small tray on his lap with an overcooked, paper-thin patty and half-frozen fries. There was even a plastic cup filled with pudding.
Maria appeared uncomfortable with the room, and pulled the curtain around Bob’s bed for privacy as he ate. Then she scurried out of the room.
Bob was famished and dove right in, nearly choking on the dry burger.
“Bob…?”
He stopped in mid-chew, tried to swallow the burger like a mouthful of ashes.
“Bob…are you there?” The voice sounded as unsteady as a windblown flame.
He set his food down, the color fading from his cheeks.
Someone was moving around his bed. He could see their shadow through the thin fabric of the curtain, like water pearled and moving under ice.
“Who is it?” he managed to ask. “Who’s there?”
“It’s me, Bob. It’s…Rose…”
His fear was visible: brittle in his bones and waxy on his skin. Tears stood in his eyes. “Rose?”
A hand, mottled brown and green and black, slimy, and riddled with weeping pustules, gripped at the curtain and began to slowly move it aside.
“It’s been so long, Bob…so long…”
The room stunk like a ripe and moldy cheese. Bob could taste it on his lips.
The shape of the head on the other side of the curtain bobbed and nodded as if it were an enormous rose bloom caught in the breeze.
“I’ve come for you, Bob. I’ve come to take you home.”
“Jesus, Rose, it can’t be you…you’re…you’re dead.”
They swallowed him, even as she moved to the side of his bed, her stench so ripe that the air seemed to be flavored with it.
The bark of a dog broke the spell as Winston bolted into the room.
“Hey there, Dad,” Janet said, wearing a smile that masked her worry and concern. “Are you up for a couple of visitors?"
Bob twisted back around to see if the horrifying vision on the other side of his bed was still there.
Nothing…though the curtain moved slightly as if by an unseen breeze.
“Jesus, Dad, you look as if you've seen a ghost! Are you all right?”
He tried to relax his fear, erase the vision from his mind. “Uh...yeah…I’m fine.”
Janet gave him an intense look. Winston kept barking at something on the other side of the room.
“You...uh...you just startled me that's all.”
He kept looking toward the other side of the bed, afraid that something would throw the curtain back and lunge at him. The dog continued to yap.
“Uh...Janet?”
“Winston, would you please shut up!” Janet slapped her hands onto her lap. “Come here, boy. Come here.” The dog came grudgingly over, turned to bark once more, and then jumped up on Bob’s bed.
“Janet? Is there a lady next to me? You know…in the other bed?”
Janet's face twisted into a questioning glance. “A lady?”
She walked to the other side of the curtain, then grabbed it and slid it all the way open. “There's no one here, Dad. The room’s all yours.”
He stared at the neatly made bed alongside his. “But there was an old woman in that bed when they wheeled me in here this afternoon.”
“An old woman? They told me at the front desk you had this room all to yourself."
Bob rubbed at his face with both hands as if he could wash away the terrible vision. “I swear, Janet, she was right there. You believe me, don’t you?”
Anyway, as you can see, it isn't quite done yet. Most of the situations are from true events that have happened to my mom and dad while in a nursing home. Of course, I embellished upon them, but hey, I'M A WRITER!
The story still cries out for, "MORE!" And I will feed it until its happy.
Until next time,
billwilcox
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Stories Best Read At Night
|  | I Walk (18+)
A journal found outside a public restroom, it was just recently released to the public.
#1450503 by Coyote Smith |
Excerpt: A young woman is about to die in a car accident. She’s driving along a residential road and there’s a schoolbus coming towards her and she doesn’t know it. I don’t know where this is, what country it is or anything. There’s a young boy rolling up his homework and chewing up a piece of torn off paper in his mouth and soon he’ll spit it out through the rolled up tube he made and hit the busdriver’s rear view mirror. The driver will turn around to yell at him and in that instant his foot will slip forward and press the gas pedal down too far and the bus will speed forward and crash directly into the side of the young woman’s car. She will be broken into pieces. I can’t do anything about it but I know it’s going to happen in about five seconds.
Excerpt: Not believing what I‘m seeing, headlights appear and temporally rebuff the beast. The creature halts its feeding and reluctantly ascends to the trees above. The car draws near as I snake my way through the brush and try to reach the road. I lounge out and collapse on the pavement only to go unnoticed. They didn’t see me. They didn’t see me? I watch as my fleeting hope disappears into darkness. This world has never felt so cold, so cruel. Leering at the trees, I await my demon. It’s quiet at first. No sound, no wind, the world kneels before it. Then with two large flutters of its wings it descends several yards behind me. I don’t move, nor does it. It’s toying with me. I turn and look it in the eyes, only hell could spawn such a thing.
Excerpt: Laura knew the bright light didn’t have anything to do with it. She switched on the bare bulb and recoiled at the sight. Sitting in the corner was a man... or at least what was left of one. Pallid grey skin hung off his emaciated skeleton like drapery; his stringy muscles and tendons visible through the holes in his flesh.
But what was worse than his desiccated body was the horror around him. Broken bones and lumps of rotten flesh... the remains of his many meals. His mouth was smeared with blood and strands of muscle and flesh dangled from his lips. Laura took a deep breath and forced a smile onto her face as the man’s eyes fluttered open.
| |  | Invalid Item
This item number is not valid.
#1476829 by Not Available. |
Excerpt: Unable to move, as if her legs possessed the weight of a thousand lost souls, she watched horrified when the white mist morphed into the backside of a huge clown. His massive shoulders and wide legs did not match the familiar image of circus clowns. Instead, large symbols smashing by her ears woke the malice that lay dormant inside. All sense of innocence lost consumed her thoughts. Old men pawed at her like lions tearing at their prey. Her dead mother laughed while injecting the liquid that led to her doom. The imposing clown's red hair was divided in three even pyramids matching his buttoned nose. He turned and faced Genesis. Screams filled the dense void only to be suffocated by the weight of fear, admonishing all hope for salvation. The evil clown smelled her anxiety and with his thoughts said, “The virgin will die.”
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Talk To Me! Ask Anything...
lkokko
Submitted Comment:
Oh, so true. Many changes wind up being the nudge our muses sometimes need to get creative again.
I liked the "Excerpts" for the stories, nice touch. You picked some really good ones to highlight our genre.
- thanks.
Thanks Larry, it isn't easy to surf this website trying to glean the best horror I can find. There are so many talented authors here it's like opening the Ark of the Covenant.
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Horror/Scary: May 06, 2009 Issue [#3030]
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