I couldn’t wake up, so I knew it must be real, but how did I get here?
I couldn’t stay in the stairwell door frame, so I stepped cautiously out into the hall. I came to the first patient room door. A sign on the door read “101.” As I passed the room, the stairwell door slammed with a loud crash! I spun around, my heart in my throat and backed into the wall behind me. Again, I heard raspy, phlegmy coughing from the opposite end of the dark hallway. It was a woman coughing, I’m sure of it. I crept farther down the hall past more patient rooms, “102” on the right side, “103” on the left. The rooms with doors open were strewn with old chairs, ragged privacy curtains, and more ceiling tiles. A sign on the wall pointed with an arrow “Solarium & Cafeteria.”
It must be past those double doors on down the hall. Oh God, something is on the other side of the doors! What was that shadow?
The stainless-steel double doors had small square windows. Something or someone passed by it on the other side. It was darker than the hallway. I couldn’t go back, and I was terrified to go forward. But I had to go forward if I wanted to get out of this hell-hole.
I found a mop handle and used it to push one of the doors open just a crack. Then I pushed hard so that the door hit the wall behind it. There was nothing there that I could see, although the hall on that side of the doors was just as black as the side I was on.
Carefully I approached the doors like a policeman would, taking nothing for granted.
Nothing but more darkness and patient doors. If I could just reach the Solarium, maybe I could find my way out of this nightmare. I walked through the doors and held them, so they closed silently behind me. What good it was to do that I don’t know, but I wanted to be as quiet as I could. I walked by several old dusty wheelchairs and a gurney. Finally, I reached the end of the hall that made a “T” intersection with another hallway. A sign with an arrow pointing to the right said, “Solarium & Cafeteria.” I turned the corner and as I did, I heard rusty wheels rolling behind me. I looked back in time to see the gurney rolling and bump into the wall!
I ran as fast as I could toward the Solarium paying no mind to the many empty rooms along the way. Suddenly I was in the Solarium, I think. There were all these windows, I guess it was the same thing as a big sunroom. There were broken, dirty chairs all over, two old wheelchairs, and an old piano. Nothing marked “EXIT” though. At the other side of the room, I could make out through the moonlight that came through the dirty and broken windows, a sign that read “Cafeteria.” I stood next to one of the pillars that supported the room looking for another direction to go when I heard the piano keys tinkle slightly. I went closer, thinking that there was a rat or mouse inside. I walked up to it, and it made a crashing musical sound as though someone hit the keys really hard, someone who knew how to play.
I ran past the piano and down the hall toward the cafeteria. I rounded the corner in the cafeteria hallway and there next to an old porcelain water fountain was a woman in a wheelchair. I froze where I stood. “Hello?” She looked real. Suddenly there was a door slam somewhere down the hallway. I turned to look and when I turned back to the woman, both the wheelchair and she were gone! I went over to where I had seen her and on the floor were fresh marks where the wheels had disturbed the dust.
Maybe this stuff goes on all the time, maybe they don’t even know I’m here…
Someone was reading my mind because I heard a raspy woman’s voice whisper next to me, “David.” I said to whoever whispered my name, “I’m leaving, I’m trying to leave. I don’t even know how I got here.”
I didn’t run, but I sure walked fast toward the cafeteria doors. I looked inside, and it was eerily lit by the moonlight coming through the windows in the hall across from the cafeteria. Chairs were strewn about around dirty, dusty tables holding nothing but fallen tiles. It was a cavernous and ominous place. Then I noticed one of the lights dangling from the ceiling was swinging. A chair scooted several feet by itself! I ran past the cafeteria down another hallway full of patient rooms. One by one, they slammed closed as I ran past! I thought that was the end for me, I thought I was going to be killed somehow.
I reached another “T” intersection and looked to my right to see a tall dark form of a man standing at the end. I ran in the opposite direction, too scared to look behind me. I hear his footsteps chasing me and suddenly he grabs me…and I awake to my mother shaking me, telling me I’m having a nightmare.
I never made it out of the haunted sanatorium.
(Many other night terrors will be waiting for you "In Dreams"....but you'll have to wait until it's finished. TTFN!)
Comments