Shallow Graves (The Haunted Book 1) Read online

  You keep reading, and I’ll keep writing.

  Best,

  Patrick

  Montreal, 2016

  And now, for a sneak peak of Book 2 in The Haunted Series, The Seventh Ward…

  The Seventh Ward

  The Haunted Series

  Book 2

  Patrick Logan

  Prologue

  “Hey, Danny, you almost done over there?”

  Danny pulled the headphones out of his ears, then switched off the floor cleaner.

  “What? You say something?”

  He eyed his friend from across the hall. Lawrence was tall, thin, and had a perpetually goofy expression on his narrow face. Big ears, big eyes, big mouth pretty much summed him up.

  “I asked if you were done,” Lawrence replied. He balled up the paper towel that he had been using to clean the silver gurney and tossed it into the waste bin.

  “Almost…” Danny waved a hand, indicating the thin strip of dirty floor on the other side of the hallway. “Just have to do that strip and then I’m done—we can pack it up then.”

  A quick glance at the Timex on his wrist revealed that it was nearly three in the morning. “Yeah, let’s stop at three.”

  Lawrence smiled at him, revealing a set of large, almost buck teeth.

  “Then can we go check out that ward?”

  Danny made a face.

  “What ward?”

  Lawrence rolled his eyes and tore off another sheet of paper towel.

  “Don’t be coy—you know what ward.”

  Danny’s eyes narrowed and he grimaced.

  “No,” he said simply, jamming his headphones back into his ears before his friend could complain. He knew that Lawrence was talking, but with his music blaring, he couldn’t make out the words, which was fine by him. After switching the floor cleaner back on, and feeling the vibrations that traveled up his arms, he couldn’t hear Lawrence at all.

  As Danny maneuvered the device toward the dirty strip in the hallway, which was also the final hallway in the Eighth Ward of Pinedale Hospital that required cleaning, he let his mind wander.

  Why are we cleaning this place again?

  After all, the hospital had been abandoned for years…a decade or more. Not a native of Corgin, two weeks ago Danny had never even heard of the place. After a little research, however, he thought that the blond man in the suit was pulling his leg.

  Clean an abandoned hospital? What for?

  At the time, the man’s response had been convincing enough: they were thinking of turning it into some sort of museum, an archive of old-fashioned equipment from the mid to late nineties. But glancing around now, Danny couldn’t see anything that remotely resembled museum-worthy pieces. In fact, most of the medical equipment had been removed, presumably by the company that had packed up the hospital in the first place, or by looters. What was left wasn’t ‘antique,’ but just shit. Even his inexperienced mind knew that.

  After all, most of his experience had come in the form of cleaning it up.

  The fact that Danny Dekeyser had been approached by the man at all had been a surprise. Cleaning an entire hospital, a total of eight wards, was a massive job, and all he had was himself and Lawrence to do the work. Truthfully, one of the much larger, commercial companies would have been a better fit, and Danny had nearly said as much. But with his medical bills piling up and the numbers that the stranger in the suit was throwing around, how could he refuse? Especially with a wife and daughter to support.

  The floor cleaner suddenly chuffed, and Danny looked around the side to make sure it hadn’t snagged on anything. There was something pink, like a wad of gum, stuck halfway out of the hard red bristles. He moved the brush-wheel back and forth aggressively over the spot a few times, but whatever it was, it refused to unglue from the floor.

  “Fuck,” he grumbled, slipping the scraper from the loop on his belt. He shut off the buffer and pulled it off the pink wad. As he squatted to start scraping, he heard Lawrence mumbling, and he reluctantly pulled one of the buds out of his ears.

  “What?” he said without turning.

  “Fuck, man, you gotta turn that shit down. Not good for your ears.”

  Danny said nothing.

  “Jesus, you’re in a mood today, aren’t you?”

  Danny stared at the three-inch-long piece of gum or whatever the hell it was for a second, his eyes defocusing.

  He slid the scraper under the one side, which was thicker than the other, and gave it a little push.

  “Danny?”

  Danny shook his head and turned to his friend.

  “Sorry, man. Just tired, is all. I want to go home, have a beer, put my dogs up.”

  He had been feeling off lately, and was trying his best not to think about the prospect of the cancer returning. It had been in remission for nearly two years, but his doctor had said he would never quite be out of the woods. And ever since he had accepted the job at Pinedale Hospital, he had been feeling rundown, which was exactly how he had felt before his initial diagnosis.

  “Yeah, man, I hear ya,” Lawrence responded. His goofy face went serious for a second, and Danny knew what the man was thinking, because he was thinking it too.

  He shrugged.

  “It’s nothing, maybe a cold—the flu. Fuck, I’ll be fine.” Then he smiled. A weak smile, but a smile nonetheless.

  The goofy grin on Lawrence’s lips returned and he made his thick eyebrows dance.

  “I thought I heard something.”

  Danny pulled the other headphone out.

  “Now?”

  “No, not now. Before, when I was yelling your name for like five minutes.”

  Danny shook his head, thinking back to the blond man in the suit handing over the set of keys—archaic things that looked as ancient as some of the leftover equipment—and the keycards. The keys got you into the building, but from there, in order to get around, you needed to use the keycards.

  “There’s no one else here.”

  “Heard a door close.” His grin grew. “Below us.”

  Now it was Danny’s turn to roll his eyes. What had happened in Pinedale about five years before it shut down had become something of an urban legend, and although Danny hadn’t even heard of the place before, a quick Internet search had revealed plenty.

  Mostly—maybe all—bullshit, something about a psychiatric inmate butchering another patient and a doctor, trying to prove some insane theory of his.

  Danny believed none of it. Lawrence, on the other hand, was obsessed.

  Let’s go find the Seventh Ward, he would start each night with, and Danny would tell him no.

  The man in the suit’s instructions were explicitly clear: they were supposed to start on the top floor, on the Eighth Ward. The cancer ward, ironically. And then they were to make their way down. Leave it to Lawrence to point out that the ward numbers jumped from six to eight.

  Only once had Danny, during a rare moment of weakness, allowed Lawrence to go exploring. Stranger still was the fact that he had gone with his friend.

  In the basement, they had found a single door, the only one in the entire hospital, as far as he could tell, that was unlabeled. And neither of the keycards that the man had given them would open it.

  This is the Seventh Ward, Lawrence had said giddily, to which Danny had promptly replied that it was probably just storage.

  Danny stifled a cough and swallowed the phlegm that filled his mouth.

  “There’s no one here,” he said, turning back to the floor. His gloved hand brushed against the pink thing. It was surprisingly soft, pliable even.

  What the fuck?

  Even the layers of dust in the abandoned hospital had their own layers of dust; the doors had been closed for years.

  But this…this pink thing appeared fresh…organic even. It looked strangely like a finger, a smooth, pink finger with no nail on the end.

  Danny made a disgusted face.

  Maybe…maybe Lawrence was—

&nb
sp; But the door to the cancer ward was suddenly thrown wide, cutting off all rational thought. Danny’s head shot up so quickly that he lost his balance and fell backward, smacking his tail-bone on the floor.

  “Wha—wha—?” he stammered, trying to catch his bearings.

  Lawrence cried out when a lumbering shadow emerged from the open door.

  “Danny?”

  Swallowing hard, Danny managed to regain a modicum of control and pushed himself to his feet.

  “Who is it?” he demanded, trying to sound authoritative. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  His words came out meek despite his efforts.

  They only had two work lights, both running on a set of lithium-ion batteries: one was splashed against the hallway wall so that Danny could see where he was cleaning, while Lawrence was using the other to clean the gurneys. Neither were pointed at the door at the end of the hall, leaving that area basking in darkness.

  As it was, Danny could only make out a shadow in the doorway.

  But then the figure stepped into the light, and Danny felt his heartrate double.

  He was huge, bigger than any man that Danny had ever seen—at least six foot six, maybe even taller. But that wasn’t the most shocking thing about him.

  The man was fragmented somehow…all hard angles, none of his features matching up perfectly. Thick, lace-like stitches crisscrossed his massive barrel chest, which had—Jesus Christ—a single, purple and deformed breast sutured to the center. The man’s right arm was proportionate, but the left was considerably smaller, and while the former was a pale gray, the latter was a dark, pigmented brown.

  And that said nothing of the mess between his legs.

  “Wha—what—you—you can’t be in here,” Danny stammered. His grip instinctively tightened on the metal scraper.

  The man laughed and bounded awkwardly toward him, failing to notice Lawrence, who had since slunk behind his trolley full of cleaning supplies.

  Danny froze in place as the man neared.

  He was even more hideous up close, his face a mishmash of different features, none of which seemed to fit: a dark, black nose, bent slightly to the right; the skin surrounding his left eye pink, as if sunburned. His mouth was a jagged slit that continued nearly to his ear on the left side, the stitches having since separated.

  It was like Frankenstein’s monster, only more hideous.

  And it was real.

  “What the fuck—you can’t—”

  “The name is George,” the man said. When he spoke, the stitches in his face separated even more, revealing a row of rotting yellow molars.

  Danny wanted to run—he wanted to turn and get the fuck out of there as fast as humanly possible. But he couldn’t.

  It was as if his feet were encased in ice.

  The man continued his approach, his gait awkward, lumbering, as if one leg was a few inches shorter than the other. And the worst part was that Danny thought that maybe this was the case, but he was too scared to look away from the man’s dark, black eyes to check.

  As George traversed the short distance between them, Danny started to pick up a general funk, a rotting smell that soon became so pungent that it made his eyes water.

  When he was only two feet away, George suddenly stopped, his eyes narrowing. At first Danny thought that he was staring at him, but then he lowered his gaze and chuckled.

  “There it is,” he said. The monster bent at the waist, revealing more of the thick, shoelace-like stitches that crisscrossed his back.

  George groaned and grabbed the pink thing that Danny had been trying to remove from the floor. With a yank, he pulled it off the ground. Then he brought it up to eye level and studied it for a moment before chuckling again.

  “That’s where that went.”

  Then he showed Danny his left hand…and the missing thumb. Like a magician pulling a parlor trick, he raised the pink appendage up and moved it back and forth from where it had been amputated.

  Danny’s stomach lurched and he could feel his whole body tense. Sweat broke out on his brow.

  The man’s face suddenly went serious.

  “You hear that?”

  Danny swallowed hard and gaped at the human freak show before him. It couldn’t be real, of course. It had to be the cancer coming back. The first time he had been diagnosed, and shortly after starting chemo, he remembered wild, vivid dreams. Even during the day, he would occasionally have minor hallucinations.

  Nothing as horrific as this, of course, but it just couldn’t possibly be real.

  “I said, did you hear that?” George asked again, his voice deepening, becoming more aggressive. No matter how intimidating the man was, Danny still couldn’t bring himself to answer.

  George leaned in closer now to within three inches of Danny, and it was all he could do not to vomit.

  The man’s breath reeked of rotting fish, and that said nothing of the horrific details of his face: the stitches, the patchwork skin that had so clearly been scavenged from other people. And judging by the smell, it had been none too fresh when it had been harvested.

  “I think it was the Goat,” George hissed. “I heard he was coming.”

  A shout suddenly erupted from somewhere behind George.

  “I don’t know who the fuck—” But before Lawrence could finish his sentence, something flashed in Danny’s periphery.

  The broom handle came down in a swooping arc. It thwacked against George’s segmented back, and the man straightened, pulling away from Danny, taking his awful, rotting breath with him.

  He grunted and started to turn. The way he moved was awful, the patchwork skin all possessed with different plasticity, bending and folding and creasing independently.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” he whispered. Lawrence reared back to swing the broom again, when Danny finally snapped out of his stupor.

  “No! Don’t!” he shouted, but he was too late.

  George grabbed the broom from Lawrence with the hand that still had a thumb, and in one sharp tug, he pulled it from his grasp.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” George repeated.

  Danny wanted to do something, would have done something to help his friend, but he was too slow. With his other hand, George reached out and grasped Lawrence by the throat. Even without a thumb, the man’s grip was so strong that Lawrence couldn’t peel it away even with both hands.

  Gasping, Danny stood helplessly and watched his friend begin to thrash as he was lifted clean off the floor.

  “He’s coming…he’s coming…he’s coming…” George began to repeat over and over again.

  It was then that Danny realized that he was still gripping the paint scraper in his hand. He raised it slowly, almost robotically, with the intention of driving it into George’s neck, when Lawrence’s eyes suddenly started to cloud over, to turn completely black.

  Danny Dekeyser dropped the paint scraper and ran.

  ***

  With only his small penlight to lead him, Danny couldn’t find his way to the front door of Pinedale Hospital. Instead, he found himself moving deeper into the bowels of the hospital, trying to get far enough away that he could no longer hear Lawrence’s screams.

  Eventually, he found himself at a door—the door that he and Lawrence had tried to open a week ago, but had failed. In his desperation, however, this slipped his mind. His outstretched hands found the door handle and he gripped it furiously, rattling it up and down, all the while banging his shoulder against it.

  It wouldn’t open.

  And then his penlight blinked out.

  “Fuck,” he whispered into the pitch blackness.

  His hand went to his hip next, grabbing the keycard that was attached via a retractable cord. He yanked it hard, and then blindly waved the card in the area that he assumed the reader was. At first nothing happened, and his nearly overwhelming panic started to become a crescendo. In his mind, he could hear George’s heavy, thumping footsteps, one hard, one light.


  “C’mon, c’mon,” he muttered, now waving the card aimlessly in the dark.

  Just when he was going to release the retractable cord and move deeper into the hospital to search for an area that was better lit by the moonlight, he heard a muted beep and a small green LED light cut through the darkness.

  Yes!

  Danny yanked on the door and pulled it wide, quickly stepping inside. He closed it behind him, and then raised his head to where he thought the pane of glass was. Even though he couldn’t see anything in the darkness, knowing that he was staring out of the window, eyes wide, offered him some comfort.

  For a long while, the only noise that Danny heard was the sound of his own breathing. As his heartrate began to normalize, he was suddenly overcome with the urge to cough. He brought a hand to his mouth and pressed his lips together as hard as he could in an attempt to stifle it.

  Given the tightness in his chest and lungs, Danny did a fairly good job of holding back; only spit sprayed from his lips.

  The problem was, even during his stifled spurts, he continued to hear the same rhythmic breathing.

  Only now he was sure it wasn’t his.

  Danny, eyes wide, desperately seeking something, anything, in the utter blackness, whipped around, his back pressing up against the door.

  Then he smelled it again: the unmistakable odor of rot.

  “Welcome to the Seventh Ward, Danny. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  PART I - Another Letter, Another Job

  Chapter 1

  Robert Watts leaned back from his computer and rubbed his eyes. Despite spending more than a decade looking at numbers on a computer screen, he just didn’t have the stamina for it anymore.

  Something had happened to him after he’d left Audex; he had slowly lost his patience with cellphones and other electronic devices. In fact, the Harlop Estate didn’t even have a TV, much to Cal’s chagrin.

  Shelly, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care either way.

  The only thing that Robert couldn’t do without was Wi-Fi, which was why fitting the place with a solid Internet connection was one of the first things he had done since moving in.