Angels or Demons?
[a short story of sorts, continues]
When Jonathan had finished his tale, I saw that all our mugs were nearly empty. “How about it guys? Another round? In any case after luminous faces and six-eyed suns or angels, I need something more to drink. You all on board?” I started to get up to go into the house.
Peter immediately grinned and said, “Just don’t forget. It’s your turn. Don’t try to distract us with your more beer ploy, though we appreciate the offer. Eh, brother Jon?”
“Indeed, my friend. Right you are. The potato chip bowl is empty too. And didn’t I hear you mention carrot slices, celery sticks and beer cheese earlier, or was that just more of my —er— imaginings?” Jon and Peter both laughed, as did I.
In fact I had forgotten the food and beer cheese; well nigh unforgivable offenses in our group. I chuckled and went into the house, took three bottles of Michelob dark from the fridge along with the carrots, celery and beer cheese. I took the beer out first, set mine down on the metal table next to my chair, then handed a bottle to each of the guys.
I went back into the house, got down a pack of paper plates, unstuck three from the pack, stabbed the beer cheese with a small serving knife with a green plastic handle, grabbed a new bag of Lays’ crinkled chips from the pantry, put everything on a handy serving try, and went to the heavy sliding glass door. Peter had gotten up to get the door, and we were set. He returned to his chair and I to mine. I poured the fresh cold beer into my mug, and leaned back.
“How now brown cow?” said Jonathan. “Do you, the English teacher, have a story of the supernatural ready for us. Surely, Michael, you’ve had some kind of uncanny experience, even given your youth.” He laughed and looked at Peter. I was 39, the youngest of the group, though I had been teaching at STC since I was 27, fresh out of grad school, with a Doctor of Philosophy degree and a brand new blue gown with sash, full of myself and nearly scared witless when I met my first class here. Even though I had a legitimate degree from a reputable institution, the University of Michigan, no less, I knew I really knew next to nothing substantial. But I had faith, not in myself. I was a Catholic and sometimes critical of that institution, though I was sincere in my belief about Christ, the cross, and the resurrection. I toughed out those first long weeks and said I didn’t know when I didn’t know, which was more often than it should have been. I still get nervous before each class.
I discovered quickly, however, that I loved teaching, loved working on preparations, and charting insights on the blackboards. I also loved working with bright and curious students. Oddly, though my first love was Shakespeare, I think I did my best teaching in the short story class that I somehow picked up soon after I started at St. Thomas. Short stories are good to teach because they can be dealt with in their entirety in a single 50 minute class. My favorite authors in this genre are Flannery—“If it’s just a symbol to hell with it”—O’Connor; Eudora—The Golden Apples—Welty; and James—Dubliners—Joyce.
Actually, I was stuck. I had had an experience a couple months ago when I was in the hospital with Covid-19. I was however shy about recounting it. It was all I had though.
“Okay,” I said. “I think I’m ready. You remember when I was in our good Catholic hospital with a fairly severe case of Covid? Headache, fever, difficulty breathing. The latter was the thing that put me in the hospital. I’d heard that taste and smell might be affected, but since my head was always stuffed up anyway, who knows?”
Both men nodded, they remembered, then looked at me as though they couldn’t believe I was about to tell them a hospital story. Jonathan put a large chip back on his plate, leaned forward, and said, “You aren’t about to give us a Henry James untrustworthy narrator, I hope.”
“No! I plucked this one from Cervantes,” I replied, crunching a carrot covered with beer cheese. I took a big gulp of my beer to wash the food down, leaned back and tried to look somewhat professorial. “My experience happened the third night I was there. I was much recovered, the respirator was gone—I had had the first two shots, after all.”
I suddenly felt a chilling breeze blow across the deck, an apt precursor to my slightly chilling experience I thought. I noticed that both Jonathan and Peter felt it too.
“Do you guys want to go inside for a while?”
“No we don’t “ said Peter, “and quit stalling.”
“I’m not stalling,” I said. “It was just such a frightening experience that I hesitate even to try to explain it.”
“Well, go for it,” said Peter. “Or we’ll have to have more beer if you don’t get to it quickly now.”
“Okay, okay! It was my third night there, and after eleven o’clock hospitals tend to get eerily quiet, especially in isolation wards. The lights seem dimmer, and there are few sounds from the hall since most patients are asleep, and there are only a few nurses left to cover emergencies on each floor. I was on the third floor and at one end of the long hospital corridor, about four or five Covid rooms from the nurse’s station in the middle.
“I remember that I had been reading something rather spooky out of a collection of short stories by Dorothy Sayers, I think. I had gotten past the Lord Peter stories, 2, and the Montague Egg stories, 5, I believe. I had made it through the various other mysteries in the collection to a final haunting tale of a heinous murder of a little boy. I had just finished that story when I fell asleep.
“I had the nurse keep one of the overhead lights on so I could see to read. It must have been about 2 when the drugs and sleep caught up with me and I passed out, so to speak. The next thing I knew though was that there was an unmasked nurse in my room, next to my bed. She was quite beautiful, wearing a dark green nurse’s uniform, darker than the one the last nurse had on.
“Her eyes were a deep black almost, and she smiled down at me and said, ‘Time to draw some blood.’ Her voice was a little chilling. I glanced at the clock. It was 3 a.m. She had just started to move the brown metal hospital tray from across my body, when suddenly she drew back her hand as if she had been burned. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked her. She looked at the tray which held several books, the large plastic water pitcher with its dark blue cap and white straw sticking through it, and several other things.
“When she looked down at me again, I saw that her lips were curled in a bestial snarl, and her incisors glistened in the room’s light; she was trying to grab my right arm which was exposed. I felt something sharp in my arm as she bent over it, and I swung my left fist at her, heard a loud crash and woke up, shivering and sweating. There was no nurse in the room and I had hit the edge of the metal tray apparently.”
“So you were dreaming of some kind of demonic attack?” Peter asked. “And then you woke up when your fist hit the tray? Well, that’s disappointing. I wanted a real demon. A good old fashioned succubus perhaps.”
“I think she was that,” I said, “though she wasn’t trying for sex since the tray was in the way. She couldn’t move it and was trying for my blood instead.”
“Why do you suppose she couldn’t move tray, assuming there was something really there?” Jonathan looked skeptical.
“Because,” I responded, “my Vatican rosary was also sitting on it. Blessed by the Pope! Heavy artillery! Furthermore,” I continued, “when I looked at my right arm there were the beginnings of two slight puncture wounds with a tiny bit of blood on the top of each. I’m pretty sure she or it was there.”
“It’s a Catholic hospital,” said Peter. “How could she (or it) get around all the crucifixes on the walls of every room?”
“The efficacy of every icon depends on the faith of the person who has it, perhaps. It may be a Catholic hospital but I suspect most of the patients aren’t especially religious in this day, age and culture.”
“Yes, but you are and she got past the one in your room.”
“That’s the thing. There wasn’t one in my room. I asked the masked nurse about that later, my “Lone Ranger,” ha, and she said that a former patient had probably pulled it off and taken it home. They do that sometimes. She said she would see that it was replaced quickly. I didn’t tell her about my strange encounter as she was busy drawing blood from my left arm and running it into one of her two little vials. Since she was taking it out of my left arm, she didn’t notice the “bite” marks. However, when she looked away, I picked up the used alcohol swab she had put down on the tray and wiped the blood off the two wounds.”
“This storytelling has been quite a trip,” said Peter, draining his mug and crunching a coated baby carrot. “That beer cheese is really excellent; where did you buy it?”
“Kroger’s, where else? Like the first day of creation in Genesis, the beer cheese is good!”
That comment earned me two savory “Amens!”
Jonathan, having finished his beer, said, “I’ll help you carry this stuff back inside, and then I have to be going. Big night ahead of me. I intend to binge watch the fourth season of ‘Inspector George Gently,’ only two episodes, I think, though each is an hour and a half. He’s a great character, one of the few really morally sound characters on TV.”
“Serendipity,” I said. “We could watch them here, for that’s where I am too. How about it Peter? You up for some good TV detective stories, the rational world, after our tales of the supernatural and uncanny? I’ve got cold meat—thin sliced ham, plenty of bread and provolone. Sandwiches for supper, if that’s okay with you guys.”
“Well, I haven’t seen any of this series, but sure, it sounds like fun, as long as there’s a beer or three left. Let’s bring the chips and beer cheese, make those cold meat sandwiches, turn on the TV, gently, and go for it.”
And that’s what we did!
First Image: Not a nurse! Nightmare succubus prowling a hospital hall! Definitely not a nurse! [image by MJS]
Second Image: Could be a nurse! Definitely could be, playing a role?
