The Phantom Cabinet Read online

  ««—»»

  Now she had her legs in stirrups, her head and back resting on a large white cushion. Her vulva and its surrounding area had been cleaned, and then left exposed for all to see.

  The delivery nurse, a skinny little thing named Ashley, stood aside Martha, wearing a ridiculous scrub top crammed with images of rattles and teddy bears. The obstetrician, an elderly warhorse christened Dr. Kimple, hovered at the foot of the bed, her plain green scrubs infinitely more dignified in comparison. Carter stood in the background, a hospital gown over his apparel, shifting from foot to foot like he had to urinate. All three wore gloves, masks and hairnets, leaving them nearly indistinguishable from each other.

  Martha’s legs trembled violently, as she experienced a succession of cold flashes. She’d thrown up once already; her stomach still heaved in turmoil. Her body ached with an intense expulsion urge, and bore down in the effort to do so.

  “It’s crowning,” proclaimed Dr. Kimple.

  As her vaginal opening sought to stretch beyond its maximum circumference, Martha gave herself over to the burning sensation, wondering if she’d be sexually inoperable from that point onward.

  She became aware of a fifth presence in the room, lurking at vision’s edge. Dim lighting left the intruder swimming in shadows; only its white porcelain mask was visible.

  Slowly, the entity drew closer, until it loitered mere feet from Martha’s bed. The mask it wore was featureless, save for slight hollows to indicate eye space. Incredibly, the mask floated inches before the being’s face, sporadically shifting, offering brief glimpses of the shiny, suppurating visage of a recent burn victim.

  The specter wore a woman’s form, one much abused. At some point, her body had undergone radical vivisection, leaving pieces of shredded small intestine floating before her like octopus tentacles. The entity’s skin was so welt and contusion-covered that race became irrelevant. With every fluctuation, the shifting shadows disclosed a fresh atrocity.

  “Get her away from me!” Martha screamed, thrashing in her stirrups. The simple act of respiration became a struggle, and she practically shattered Carter’s hand when he attempted a reassuring squeeze.

  “Keep pushing!” shouted Dr. Kimple.

  Now the intruder was leaning over Martha, reaching out a hand absent two digits, still unperceived by the room’s other occupants. Her palm slid over Martha’s eyes, obscuring vision entirely. The mother-to-be struggled to pull the hand from her face, but the entity gripped like a steel vise.

  “What’s she doing?” asked Carter. “She’s flailing her arms like someone’s attacking her.”

  “Don’t worry,” chirped the delivery nurse. “We’ve seen far worse here.”

  The hand withdrew, taking the delivery room with it. The freestanding cupboards had disappeared, as had the baby cot. Jazz music no longer played. All pain relieving medication had been purged from her body. Writhing in agony, Martha forgot to push, barely recalled she was in the birth process.

  The hospital bed had transformed into a cold stone slab. The stirrups were gone. Instead, chains now bound Martha’s hands and feet, stretching her limbs to full length. She saw walls of soot-blackened stone, lit by strategically placed torches. An acrid urine stench filled the air. Sounds of squeaking and stealthy shuffling emanated from the floor, most likely rats.

  She screamed for her husband, but he wasn’t there. Neither were the nurse and obstetrician, it seemed. Even the porcelain-masked entity had departed.

  Finally, she heard a trod too heavy to belong to a rat. Struggling to peer past her grotesquely protruding belly, Martha beheld a strange figure approaching.

  The newcomer wore a black hooded tunic, and thick leather strips around their feet and legs. Silently, they approached, with an esquire’s helmet—closed-visored steel devoid of grille slits—clasped in one hand.

  Pausing their careful stride, the figure bent to snatch a critter from the floor: an ugly scarred creature the size of a full-grown cat, exposing canine teeth sharp as ice picks. The creature wasn’t a rat at all, it turned out, but a mixed fur ferret hissing its annoyance. Dropping the creature into the helmet, the visitor resumed their approach.

  “No, no, no…” Martha moaned, as the helmet was upended and set upon her exposed abdomen. Beneath it, the ferret moved furiously, its paws and matted fur like sandpaper against her stomach.

  The mute stranger retrieved a flaming torch from its wrought iron holder, while Martha attempted to wriggle the helmet off her midsection. Her tired muscles could only tremble.

  The torch was placed to the helmet. Soon, its blistering edges seared Martha’s epidermis. As the temperature rose, the imprisoned ferret began to panic. With teeth and claws it burrowed, tearing into Martha with reckless abandon.

  She screamed until her vocal chords shredded, screamed for what felt like eons. She could feel the ferret inside of her now—all twenty-four inches of it—and knew that it was gorging on her unborn son.

  ««—»»

  “What’s wrong with her?” enquired Carter Stanton, as his wife continued to screech.

  The delivery nurse had gone as white as her mask and hairnet, and could only shake her head in bewilderment.

  “She’s stopped pushing,” Dr. Kimple remarked tonelessly. “The poor thing has exhausted herself. If your child is to live, we’ll need to perform an instrumental delivery.”

  The words meant little to Carter. Over his wife’s frenzied howls, he barely heard them. Numbly, he watched the obstetrician cut Martha’s perineum and apply forceps to the infant’s submerged head. Slowly, Dr. Kimple eased the baby out.

  When his wife’s voice finally broke, Carter became aware of his newborn’s cries. Awestricken, he supervised the umbilical cord severance: one decisive snip. Then Dr. Kimble passed the boy, still covered in blood and amniotic fluid, into Martha’s outstretched hands.

  ««—»»

  With the ferret having chewed its way out her body, the steel helmet was no longer needed. Martha could see her lower torso now: a shredded, blood-spurting mess.

  The shackles were removed from her wrists, leaving her flailing uselessly at her tormentor. Laughing androgynously, the hooded figure offered her the ferret, red and slimy.

  “You killed my baby,” Martha rasped, even as she held the infant in question.

  Little Douglas, eyes squeezed shut, wailed his contempt at the world outside the womb. For him, everything was too bright, too raucous and chaotic.

  “She’s hysterical,” exclaimed nurse Ashley. “We better take the boy until she’s calmed down a little.”

  The ferret was in her hands now, chittering in amusement. Martha shook vehemently, squeezing its filthy neck. She squeezed until her hands ached, squeezed until she saw the light in its malignant rat-like eyes extinguished.

  ««—»»

  They’d finally wrestled the newborn away from Martha, but it was too late. Baby Douglas had gone greyish, and hung limply in his father’s hands.

  Attempts were made at resuscitation, but bag and mask ventilation proved ineffective. Martha’s violent outburst had damaged the two main arteries leading to poor Douglas’ brain, leaving the child brain dead.

  Two hospital security officers stood in the back of the room now, carved monuments in tan polyester shirts, warily eyeing the madwoman. Shell-shocked, Carter clutched his dead son, as those assembled grimly awaited placental expulsion.

  And then the lights went out.

  ««—»»

  The backup generators kicked in almost immediately, returning illumination to Oceanside Memorial. Equipment sprang back into operation. Staff returned to their duties with scarcely a pause.

  But something had changed in the hospital; the atmosphere felt charged, as if a thunderstorm was oncoming. Patients and caregivers recalled old nightmares with frightening clarity, as the temperature plummeted dozens of degrees.

  Within the medical center’s well-scrubbed corridors, malevolence manifested, coalescing into a
phantom throng. Wearing lamentations like badges, these spirits prowled for the living.

  ««—»»

  Washing up after a tonsillectomy, surgeon Kevin Montclair glimpsed a stranger’s face in the mirror above the sink. A shotgun blast had obliterated the upper right quadrant of the apparition’s head. Bits of brain and bone rested upon its chambray shirt. As the specter drifted out from the mirror, grasping with one withered hand, the surgeon screamed once, and then fainted dead away.

  In the recovery room, Montclair’s patient—a rambunctious schoolgirl named Keisha Stewart—was jolted awake, her general anesthesia having evaporated.

  Keisha’s throat was so sore that she found it difficult to scream, even as she regarded the presence straddling her chest: a crooked-teethed dwarf, indistinct within omnipresent body hair. Pawing Keisha’s face, the phantasm voiced a deflating balloon sound.

  The recovery room nurse, although just scant yards away, paid no attention to the girl’s predicament. Rhonda Marks had her own problems: namely, the four children surrounding her. Three girls and a boy, they appeared to be siblings, with matching red hair and freckle-spattered countenances. The youngsters had no lips, leaving them baring rotted teeth in nightmarish smile parodies. Wearing scraps of dirty cloth, they pressed upon her, terrifying despite their incorporeality.

  With a flash of metal, Rhonda’s right index finger was gone. Blood gushed and the nurse could only gape in shock.

  A scalpel clattered to the floor, inches from a spectral girl’s foot. Bouncing Rhoda’s finger mockingly in her open palm, the girl wiggled a lesion-covered tongue, topping the gesture with a wink.

  Delayed pain kicked in, and Rhonda regained clarity, her paralyzing fear ebbing in the interest of self-preservation. She had three children at home, after all, and knew how to deal with brats, even dead ones.

  “Give me that finger, you little hellcat. I’m gonna have it reattached, and then you four demons are going back to wherever it is you came from. If you know what’s good for you, you won’t make me repeat myself.”

  Rhonda approached the girl, who lobbed the severed digit to her brother. From child to child it was tossed, leaving the nurse no choice but to participate in a macabre game of Keep Away.

  East of the recovery room, Lonnie Chan slept uneasily in the ICU. An automobile accident had left him brain damaged two weeks prior, and he’d yet to regain consciousness. Half-formed dreams plagued his resting mind, blurs of color and smudged faces.

  Mounted on the wall behind him, a monitor screen displayed Lonnie’s intracranial pressure, blood pressure and heart rate. An endotracheal tube jammed down his windpipe kept him breathing, while an intravenous catheter pumped medicine, nutrients and various fluids into his body. Combined with the EKG lead wires connected to his chest, the ICP monitor drilled into his brain, the Foley catheter draining his bladder, and the nasogastric tube pushed deep into his nose, Lonnie now resembled a half-completed android.

  A passing anesthetist, Yvonne Barrow, heard a gnawing sound coming from Lonnie’s bed. Glimpsing nothing unusual, she patted the patient’s stocking-clad leg gently, muttering that she needed a rest.

  The gnawing sound resumed. Slowly, a naked elderly man came into focus: a withered bag of wrinkles held aloft by spindly legs. The geezer drooled over Lonnie, intently chewing at his head dressing.

  The old spook was semi-transparent. His left arm displayed a faded concentration camp identification tattoo. When he turned toward Yvonne, smiling with jagged teeth, the anesthetist lost no time in fleeing out the hospital’s receiving entrance.

  Safely outside, she saw a layer of thin grey clouds stretching across the horizon, dimming the afternoon sun. I’m barely into my shift, she realized. Her husband wouldn’t be picking her up until evening.

  Rather than reenter the hospital to phone her spouse, Yvonne began walking, leaving lunacy behind as she treaded down Rancho del Oro.

  ««—»»

  In radiology, all imaging technologies revealed death masks, whether ultrasound, MRI, CT, x-ray or PET. It didn’t matter what body segment one scanned; a face in eternal repose glared back on every monitor.

  Similarly, no heartbeat could be detected on any stethoscope. Instead, physicians heard low mumbling whispers pouring out their earpieces, whispers that promised obscenities when intelligible.

  In the cafeteria, patients and visitors idly consumed deli sandwiches, fruit, and salads. When the area’s Formica tables and chairs began to levitate, and then whip themselves across the room, three diners were left with shattered bones.

  A just-arriving driver obliterated Oceanside Memorial’s ambulance entrance, plowing into it at sixty-four miles an hour. Questioned later, he would claim that the accelerator operated of its own accord, and that the death of the ambulance’s passenger, a forty-seven-year-old stroke victim, wasn’t his fault.

  Near respiratory services, maintenance man Elvin Warfield watched a crash cart roll of its own accord. Before he knew what had hit him, Elvin found defibrillator paddles pressing both sides of his head.

  White lightning filled his vision. Agony radiated between Elvin’s temples, leaving him staggering backward with arms outstretched.

  Metal drawers slid open. Swarms of syringes engulfed him, stinging like aggravated wasps. As he collapsed to the ground, vitreous fluid leaking from slashed eyeballs, he heard the cart’s wheels squeaking afresh. Again and again, it bashed against him, until Elvin moved no more.

  ««—»»

  The hospital’s atmosphere grew heavy, as spirits continued to materialize. Apparitions wandered the corridors, rifled through medical records, and reclined in every empty bed, from the Intensive Care Unit to the respite room wherein nurses napped during breaks. Of the living, most froze in the presence of poltergeists, fearing that any sudden motion would bring terror raining down. The memorial center’s walls began expanding and contacting, as if the building had learned to breathe.

  Specters from all eras filled the hospital, encompassing a multitude of ages, races and religions. There were purple-faced strangulation victims, Quakers with cleaved skulls, samurai warriors with detached limbs, evolutionary throwbacks, and shambling monstrosities barely recognizable as human. Their touch was winter incarnate, their eyes despairing lagoons.

  As the occupation continued, surgeons paused vital operations, leaving patients perishing upon their tables. The past had returned to Oceanside Memorial, and it wasn’t very friendly.

  Then a shift occurred. Ghostly features dissolved into eerie green mist strands, which passed throughout the hospital acquiring new phantoms. Toward the delivery room, the mist traveled, its tendrils probing empty air.

  Finally, the mist found Douglas Stanton’s corpse, still pressed against Carter’s chest. Without delay, it poured into the infant, a seemingly endless procession of spectral fog. Minutes later, as the vapor’s tail end passed between Douglas’ lips, the child’s heart began to beat.

  His eyes opened and he shrieked for hours.

  — | — | —

  PART 2:

  Orbital Decay

  — | — | —

  Chapter 3

  Beer in hand, Emmett Wilson reclined across his faux leather couch. He’d been working construction all day, and his body ached from hours of installing prefabricated wall paneling. Do It Right Builders, his employer, was building a new Fallbrook housing development, a plague of tract homes, carving out miles of vegetation in their quest to pave over the planet. Still, the job covered his rent, so he couldn’t complain too much.

  His forty-two inch television was on, broadcasting a Futurama rerun Emmett found hard to follow, his mind drifting along its own currents. Mainly, he contemplated women he’d dated over the years, wondering if any of them had been worth holding onto. Just last week, he’d dumped his last girlfriend, a clingy Puerto Rican with daddy issues and a penchant for club hopping.

  The program cut to commercials, and so Emmett channel surfed, eventually settling on a soccer m
atch. Portugal was playing France, the game presently tied. In the stands, the audience was going wild, and some of that enthusiasm seemed to leak from the television, drawing Emmett from his ruminations.

  Suddenly, he was on his seat’s edge, Heineken clutched in a death grip. In Emmett’s youth, he’d spent many weekend hours with his father, watching any game that happened to be televised. Oftentimes, the man had recited obscure soccer trivia until Emmett’s eyes glazed over.

  Reminiscing about those lazy weekends, Emmett observed a strange phenomenon arising. The televised image seemed to curve, as if there was another transmission pushing its way past the current broadcast. Both field and players formed into a strangely shifting face, like a movie projected onto a Mount Rushmore visage. Then the screen went black.

  “What the hell?” Emmett gasped, overwhelmed with fear and adrenaline. He pushed the power button, but the screen remained black, unplugged and re-plugged the cord to no result. Apparently, the monitor on his two-month old television had burned out already—a grave injustice. He’d have to dig up the manufacturer’s warranty.

  He picked a Maxim off his coffee table, flipped through dog-eared photo spreads and twice-read articles before slapping it down in frustration. Emmett considered logging onto Facebook, but the social networking site always left him feeling dirty, spying on people he barely remembered. Instead, he considered the radio.

  It had been a Christmas gift from his ex-girlfriend, one he’d had little use for thus far. An Investutech brand portable satellite radio, it resembled an engorged black iPod with a thick antenna set atop it. After a twenty-minute charge, its LED screen glowed neon blue, awaiting activation.