The Grave and Dire Happenings at Angove Lodge, Four Stoney Lane
Dark forces are converging on the elderly residential home Angove Lodge. Jill Trenouth, a dispirited night nurse, has lost all enthusiasm for her career. Tonight that is all set to change. Shadows come alive, a blind man regains his sight, and three strangers arrive promising to help. Just as Jill beings to suspect that something supernatural is at play, she realises that the three strangers have an ulterior motive. Letting them in was a grave mistake.
The hallways of Angove Lodge reeked of death when Jill Trenouth entered the reception for her night shift.
She scrunched her nose up. A sickly, rhubarb-scented air freshener offended her nostrils, which she assumed was soaked into the mismatched chintz armchairs opposite the receptionist's desk. Poorly diluted disinfectant had been carelessly mopped over the chipped linoleum floor. But beneath the amalgamation of hellish odours it was there, a scent that she associated with elderly care homes, of unwashed armpits or stale breath; like meat turning rotten.
I'd choose death than see out the end here, Jill scathed.
After Jill scribbled her name in the staff sign-in book, she took a moment to peruse the list of names against the times. She shook her head. The home had been drastically short-staffed for most of that week: she didn't expect to be joined by anyone that night.
With a sigh — purposefully exaggerated on the off-chance that a shift leader was in earshot — Jill sidled away from the reception. She passed the conservatory where a puddle of urine lay untended, with only a wet floor sign to ward off passers-by. The dining room's ten square tables brimmed with dirty crockery from dinner, and the tea trolley had been abandoned in the main lounge. Day staff would have another thing coming if they thought Jill would catch up on their work. She just wanted to do her meds round and nightly checks, and leave her shift dead on seven am — no disruptions.
Please don't let them be restless tonight, she thought.
Lo and behold, that afternoon's HCA3 Liz was found in the duty office, door closed in an attempt to ignore the forty residents beyond it. Liz was a woman wider than she was tall, and as Jill entered Liz quickly tried to swipe empty food packets into the top draw of the under-desk filing cabinet. The meds trolley had been parked in the corner by the notice board. Stacked on top were teetering towers of plastic pots caked in liquid paracetamol. That was something: as long as Liz had her job right (and by fear of CQC, she most certainly would have) the people that had to be medicated, were.
'Quiet evening?' Jill greeted Liz, settling her bag and coat on the spare office chair. An ironic question considering the state of the place.
'Oh god, I haven't stopped,' Liz said with dramatic fashion, waving her hands, and a torrent of Dorito crumbs cascaded from her stretched tunic.
'Percy's been chasing the cat again?' Jill prompted. Percy, one of the home's many dementia patients, was Angove's loveable rogue.
'For once, no,' Liz chortled, 'must be a full moon or summat cos Ted has been giving us the runaround. He's on thirty minute obs.'
'Ted, Ted...' Jill said, cycling through faces and names. She worked between four homes in North Cornwall and had long since cared to commit all clients to memory.
'Room twenty-seven, blind, ex pilot,' Liz prompted.
'Oh yes. Christ, you never normally hear a peep.'
'He's been trying to get out of his wheelchair and everything. Dementia, all in the mind, ain't it?'
'Lemme guess, a UTI?' Jill mused. Urinary tract infections were the go-to excuse for nurses who wanted to brush their patients' chronic illnesses under the carpet.
Liz left minutes later, half-assedly clearing her mess from the twelve hours she spent glued to her desk, procured a box of lost and found that Jill could rifle through and reunite with their owners —
'If you get bored,' Liz said with a sly grin.
— and the trollop bounded down the halls, signed out, and squeezed through the reception's only working door into the bleak night. Jill took in the half-empty food and fluid charts, the box of lost and found, the hourly bed checks, and decided to scratch the surface of that night's work by starting regular observations with Ted Lower.
It was practically impossible that the Tregelly wing, containing bedrooms one to twenty-eight, could smell worse than the reception but it managed it. The corridor was painted in two sickly shades of blue, and under the dimmed lights it seemed stuck in a perpetual dusk.
It was there that Jill saw the shadow.
It flitted across the intersection of the two corridors — skirting unseen, or so it thought. Quick, hunched and lanky, Jill was certain it belonged to Percy: Angove's resident, and nocturnal pest. It was best to get Percy settled before she started twice-hourly observations with Ted. Percy would only complicate matters and, as Liz had quipped, it was a full moon. Jill strode quickly and turned left at the end of the corridor. Seven bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a cleaning cupboard lined the hallway before her, all closed. The doors in Angove Lodge were old — laden with asbestos, no doubt — and they'd squeak and groan when opened and closed. There'd been silence.
Silence and a shadow.
She continued to the end of the corridor and pushed against the fire exit door. It was dusty, covered in tea stains and god knows what else but it didn't budge. Nothing — no one — had left Angove that way.
Jill turned on her heels and paced towards Ted Lower's room. She'd ignore the prickling that slivered across her spine, her heart sparring behind her breastbone. Every carer in the industry believed in ghosts — after all, care homes saw more death than most. Shadows in the corner of an eye, objects misplaced by their own accord, call bells sounding from empty, locked rooms. In their line of work, it was easy to ignore such realities when the living were so demanding.
Ted's was room twenty-seven. His photo, shot from above by the towering manager Kate Turner, was tacked to the door and gave him the illusion that he was a tortoise peeping from its shell. His eyes were milk-white as if they'd caught the flash of a camera, but his eyes had long since taken in, or reflected, light. Jill rapped her knuckles on the door and pushed it inwards. Before she could stop herself, a gasp escaped her.
The retiree's wheelchair had been abandoned in the corner, between the dirtied commode and his chest of drawers that were laden with plane paraphernalia. Ted himself, who'd not walked in a decade due to osteoarthritis, staggered towards the sink and vanity mirror by the window. A catheter bag trailed on the floor between his legs, fit to burst with amber piss. The tube, Jill presumed, was still connected to his penis.
'Oh, Ted!'
Jill dove forwards, plucked the catheter bag from the ground, and gingerly secured it to the strap around his right shin. He kicked her with a stilted leg and she fell aside onto the lino flooring.
'Ted, come on now.'
Ted didn't care about Jill as she lay there on the floor, nor the catheter bag as it fell from the velcro strap and swung with pendular motion between his ankles. He did care about reaching the sink. He gripped it with shaking hands, extended his neck forwards, and glared at his reflection in the grubby mirror.
'Impossible,' Jill whispered.
Ted turned sharply. Iris' sky blue and pupils dilated, he'd regained his sight. For decades Ted's eyes had sat slack in their sockets, never moving, never focused on anything — because they couldn't. Now they did.
They were locked onto Jill.
Jill scrambled to her feet and backed towards the door, hands fumbling for the handle, never taking her eyes from Ted's.
'I'll be... I'll be back,' she stammered. 'Ted.'
'Nika,' Ted growled. 'Nika, Nika...'
Jill slipped into the hallway and pulled Ted's door shut. She was faced with his photo, sun-bleached and worn.
There's no way, she thought, no way in hell that this is possible.
A sour chill thrust past her down the hallway. She pivoted, only to see the shadowy hallway. And the shadow. Its edges were feathered by the car park's orange lights, as they seeped in from through the glass of the fire exit. And it grew. It slunk closer.
Jill bounded back up the hallway. She ignored the niggling fire in her knees and kept on to the HCA3 office. She took the cordless phone and jabbed in the manager's number that was tacked to the pinboard. Kate answered, voice flat, clearly premeditating any excuse or reason to not tend to the home out of hours. Jill couldn't even finish explaining Ted's behaviour before Kate interrupted:
'People don't just get their sight back,' she drawled. 'You've been in the industry enough — dementia, it all ebbs and flows until the end. He's just having an off night, pain does that...'
Phone pressed to her ear, Jill peeked out of the HCA3 office. The shadow loomed across the hall and encroached with the tremendous pace.
'There's something else,' Jill interrupted.
'Kernow doc's number is in the emergency folder, give them a ring and see if they can prescribe painkillers.'
The shadow became illuminated by the lounge's lights: it was Percy, pushing his zimmer, lips pursed with concentration. Jill leaned her head against the wall and sighed.
'Sure, I'll do that,' she told Kate.
'Make sure it's all logged on Nurture,' Kate retorted. 'Can't count how many times I've come to do hand over without any notes.'
'Yep,' Jill said and she hung up and slid the phone into her pocket.
*
It took Jill twenty minutes to thwart Percy's attempted escape. She settled him into an armchair in the conservatory with a cup of tea and a cheese sandwich. Whilst there she stripped the dining room tables and wheeled the tea trolley into the kitchen. She wouldn't be caught dead doing an afternoon's worth of dishes — as long as it looked like she began making a dent in the workload, no one would complain. Needing a cigarette, she emptied the overflowing recycling and hauled it outside into the bin stores. The two bulk general wastes bins were opened and full to the brim with refuse sacks. It was rare for the seagulls, Angove's unwanted residents, to have not torn them to shreds.
A light Spring wind rustled the trees. It was eerily quiet for that time in the evening.
Jill turned to the rooftops where twenty pairs of sharp eyes glowered back at her. The seagulls, wing to wing, lined the rooftop and walls that flanked the bin stores. Aside from a rare blink, not one ruffled their feathers or pruned themselves or stretched their wings to intimidate those that stood unnaturally close to them. They all watched Jill.
She backed into the kitchen and pressed the fire exit's door back into its frame. So many strange occurrences. Jill doubted anyone would believe her — most strange antics would be put down to the full moon or Jill's sleep deprivation. Working nights wasn't good for anyone's mental health; her mother always warned her so when she was alive. No, she'd learned the hard way that there was no longer care in residential homes. People did their minimum wage's worth of work and as soon as they left the front doors they no longer fretted about this place. She had to get through it, do the bare minimum that was expected of her, and leave as soon as the day staff turned up for handover.
Jill darted back to the duty office, logged onto the slow Windows computer, and opened Nurture, a care home software logging everything from meal times to falls to administered medication. She opened Ted's file and typed out everything she had witnessed into one long statement, barely pausing for basic grammar:
And his eyes he wasn't blind he was far from it I could his pupils jet black and all and he looked right at me and he spoke but it didn't sound like him at all.
She was just about to click save when the monitor fizzed into eight-bit. A logo appeared for a moment: two circles, one red, one blue, interlocked at an angle. Below that 'The Network' was written. Then there was darkness. Something within the PC pinged and the power light dissipated.
'Bugger, bugger!' Jill cried. She reached down and jabbed the power button a few times but no life returned to the computer.
The phone rang in her pocket. She jumped in her seat, holding onto the desk to stop herself from falling to the floor. She wriggled the handset from her pocket, noted that it was an unknown number, pressed answer, and put it to her ear:
'Angove Lodge, Jill speaking.'
'Hello there,' a man, a well-to-do type, said. 'I'm Doctor Peter Wright from Pink Cross, calling about one Ted Lower.'
'Right...'
'We've been contacted by his daughter, who has been worried after receiving a call from your manager, erm, hold on, where's the name — ah yes, Kate Turner.'
Finally, Jill thought, she's pulled her finger out of her arse.
'And you're from where, again?'
'Pink Cross.'
'Oh, didn't know he had private health care.'
'It should be all there in his records.'
'Yeah about that, our computer's down.' Jill reached into the filing cabinet for Ted's folder and pulled it out. 'I'll just need to do some data protection. Can you tell me Ted's full name, date of birth, and next of kin?'
'Absolutely, I've got it here, Edward Jonathan Lower, 4th February 1922 and Rachel Pascoe.'
Jill used the lid of a biro to track the details in Ted's file: they were correct.
'Brilliant,' she said. 'So Ted... God, where do I begin?'
'Tell me everything,' Doctor Wright said.
*
Jill had spoken so long that her mouth had become dry and she was out of breath.
'Right,' Doctor Wright responded. 'He's going to need a proper assessment, telephone triage just won't do. I can come tonight.'
'You can?' Jill said, joyous.
'It's a bit of a trek from where I'm based, but I'll be there within the hour.'
'That's brilliant, thank you,' Jill said. She ended the call and placed the handset onto the grubby desk.
Sixty minutes, she thought, sixty minutes at the most and you won't be alone. You can do this.
It was nearing midnight: Ted's eleven-thirty observation was overdue and he'd be ready for another. She rose and checked on Percy in the lounge: he was fast asleep in an armchair, his legs reclined. She veered down the Tregelly wing, pacing as fast as she could with our running, ignoring any meandering thoughts about that nights' strange occurrences.
Fifty minutes, she told herself.
She knocked on the door, drew a long breath, and pushed it open. Ted was still standing and the catheter bag had come loose once more but that was the least of Jill's concerns. Ribbons of scarlet blood cascaded across his withered arms. Droplets stained his white bedding, atop which was a bloodied razor blade.
'Ted!' She cried. 'Ted, no.'
Her instincts to care overtook her fear and she raced forward, plucking a clean towel from the back of his commode. She took his left forearm and proceeded to bandage it with the towel, tying the corners together into a tight knot. Ted flinched: the pain must have permeated whatever headspace he was currently in. He hissed:
'Otstan' ot menya!' He snarled, voice higher than Jill remembered it. 'Ya Nika. Ya Nika.'
Whatever he was saying wasn't English — an abrupt, fast language with harsh consonants. To Jill, it sounded Russian.
'Vytashchi menya,' Ted cried. 'Eto ne moye telo.'
'I don't... I don't know what you want. I can't help you.'
'ETO NE MOYE TELO!'
Jill stepped backward, catching the square of her back on the bedroom door.
'ETO NE MOYE TELO!'
Angove Lodge's doorbell chimed. Jill was snapped out of her horror. Without looking back at Ted, she rushed from the room, slamming the door behind her. She scarpered up the hallway, her dolly shoes skating on the lino, and when she reached the reception doors she had never been so relieved to see three strangers through the glass. She rummaged through her pockets, found her fob key, and smacked it against the sensor. She opened the door outwards to the trio. Her eyes locked onto the man in the middle, the eldest of the three.
'Doctor Peter Wright, Pink Cross,' the man said. He gestured to the man and woman on either side of him. They were both in their early thirties. 'My two juniors. All we can do at short notice. I spoke to Jill?'
Relief flooded through Jill's chest, easing fear's grasp on her lungs.
'That's me. Christ, no, no, thank god you've come.' She ushered the medical staff in quickly for Percy was bounding up the hallway towards them. She led them down to the Tregelly wing, barely registering what was coming out of her mouth: how old Ted was completely unlike himself, that they were short-staffed and so Ted's illness had been excused as a UTI. She stopped outside Ted's door, her body shaking, unable to stop her voice from warbling. 'I don't know if you know, but it's important before you see him. He hasn't walked in years. Not spoken for the same time. He's been blind since his sixties. My God...'
Jill's quaking legs gave way. She clutched the wall for support. The medical staff told her they'd need some privacy with Ted, crossed into his bedroom with cases of equipment, and closed the door behind them.
Jill stood upright and took in a deep breath.
I need caffeine.
She exited the Tregelly wing for the dining room and was just reaching the duty office when she stopped dead in her tracks. She caught sight of the equipment that the medical staff carried. They weren't stamped with the Pink Cross logo but two interlocking circles. She'd seen the very same logo pop up on the office computer before the screen crackled to nothing. Underneath it 'The Network' had been written. Jill's heart detonated.
The three strangers didn't belong to Pink Cross.
They may not even be doctors.
She spun on her heels and sprinted down the corridor to the Tregelly wing when she was thrown into darkness. The wall lights popped — bright white — and then withered once more in their brackets. There was shouting and screaming, and the crackle of static like a speaker with a loose connection. It all emanated from Ted's room.
Jill pressed on, cold sweat beading across her face when the shadow appeared before her. Curled talons, sunbursts for eyes, skeletal limbs, and skin so dark that Jill felt like she could fall into it: a never-ending abyss of despair.
The lights flashed on and the shadow slipped away. Angove Lodge was thrust into ear-splitting silence.
Ted.
Jill barged into his room. His body was on the carpet, limp and bloodied. She didn't need to check to know he was dead. The strangers were nowhere to be seen. In the corner of his room were a myriad of smashed family photos. Before that the window was wide open, the nets and curtains rippling in a rising wind. The strangers had scarpered.
They had murdered Ted Lower and fled.
The strangers hadn't signed into the guest book or left their registration details. The one name that was given — Peter Wright — was likely false.
Ted's poor body.
Outside was a riot of flapping wings and shrieks as seagulls took flight into the night.
Jill collapsed to her knees, her body numb to the piss-soaked carpet. She couldn't believe what she had done. Ted was a gentle man, a quiet soul that had mostly been no bother. Until that night, that one night where Jill had decided to be no better than her colleagues; to be negligent because she was sour at the company and the work conditions she was under; when all that Ted and his fellow residents did was depend on her to keep them safe.
Ted was dead and it was all her fault.