The saga continues. Part 4 for your enjoyment.
If you'd like to read along ...
The walk to Joe’s room was longer than for other patients, seeing as it was at the very end of one of the halls that housed the patients’ rooms. That was where the horror clichés surrounding his upkeep ended, though. For instance, there would’ve been no reason to move him into the basement, or something silly like that. Truth be told, he had one of the more spacious and well-lit rooms in the hospital, probably as a sign of his status as a patient with guardians wealthy enough to afford 20+ years of care.
None of this diminished my apprehension at going to my first session with him. Having had so many people try so emphatically to dissuade me from so much as talking to this mysterious patient most certainly had an effect, and I half-expected his door to shock me when I inserted my staff key and pulled the knob. But nothing of the sort happened.
As I said, Joe’s room was fairly spacious and well-lit, and even had an unusually large window with an impeccable view of the hospital grounds. What caused me to notice this, however, was the fact that Joe’s room seemed, if anything, larger compared to Joe himself. For such a feared patient, he did not give even the slightest impression of danger. He couldn’t have been more than 5’6,” and was about as thin as one could get without looking underfed. A mop of unruly blonde hair that looked as if it hadn’t been combed in years flopped off his head.
He was sitting with his back to me in one of the cheap hospital chairs, and as he stood up and turned to face me, I expected his face to carry some sort of unexpected terror. But even here, I was disappointed. His face was long, pale, and horsey, with a weak, drooping chin, high cheekbones, and slightly yellowed teeth. His pale blue eyes looked unfocused and almost as absent as some of the more catatonic patients I’d seen.
We stood staring at each other for a few moments before I spoke.
“Joe?” I said in my most professional tones. “I’m Dr. H-----. Dr. G----- assigned me to do therapy with you, if that’s alright with--”
“You’re young.”
His voice was reedy and low, and rasped as if he’d barely used it. It would have been slightly disconcerting, if not for the thick sorrow in it, which only made him seem more pathetic.
I nodded at him and gave him a small smile. “I am,” I said calmly. “Does that bother you?”
He shrugged. “The others weren’t as young as you. She’s getting desperate.”
“Who?”
“You know who,” he said with a bitter smile. “Her. The one who keeps me locked up here. Why doesn’t she just cut my throat while she’s at it? I’d wager she’s done it to plenty others.”
“If you’re referring to Dr. G-----, then yes, as I said—“
“Oh, doctor, doctor, doctor,” Joe said softly. Then, without warning, he punched the wall with a disgusted snort. “Well, she’s a shit doctor. Can’t heal a patient, so she locks me up with barely anyone to talk to for decades, then sends in a fresh face like you. Let me guess. You’re the brightest new doctor on the block, and they think maybe you, and only you could heal me?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised that he could work out what I’d thought were private details about me, but I was. My shock must’ve shown in my face, because he chuckled with disdain.
“It’s not like I had to be magic to figure it out,” he said. “That bitch would only send someone in here for one reason: Because she wants to fire them. You know I was probably in here when you were in diapers, and no one since then had any idea what to do with me? She knows I’m not ‘curable,’ you realize. You’re just a sacrificial lamb so she has something to report to my worthless fucking parents in order to keep them sending money, and so she can get rid of any bright, fresh faces who might make her look bad.”
I was shocked. This wasn’t at all how I imagined the most feared patient in the hospital acting. He was bitter and frustrated, yes, but seemed remarkably lucid, even sane. Hardly fruit for 20+ years of confusion and terror, let alone even still being institutionalized. What was more, his comments left a sour taste in my mouth and made me doubt what I’d been told. Could all the stories about him really just be an elaborate act to keep such a reliable revenue stream in the hospital? I quirked an eyebrow.
“Joe, you don’t think there’s anything wrong with you?” I asked.
“How the fuck should I know?” Joe shot back. “As far as I can tell, it’s everyone else who goes insane around me! It’s happened so often I sometimes wonder if they’re doing it on purpose, just to make me go as fucking nuts as they are with the anticipation for what crazy shit thing someone will do next.”
He sounded too sincere to be lying, and despite everything I’d heard, I began to feel sorry for him. Still, some of the stories stuck with me enough to make me wary, so I didn’t reply immediately. Better to keep him talking. However, again, he must’ve noticed my silence, because rather than continue his rant, Joe turned to look at me and gave me a pointed look.
“Well, go ahead, get it over with,” he said with a bitter laugh. “I’m sure I’ve done something to drive you nuts without realizing it in the past few minutes.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Well, glory halle-fucking-lujah. But I can see the gears turning in that bright young brain of yours. Go on, spit it out. What’s got you scrunching up your face like that?”
I shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know what to think, Joe. You don’t seem like a monster, but your file does have some troubling stuff in it.”
“Oh yeah?” he sneered. “This should be good. Like what?”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t think a normal person would try to rape a 12-year-old girl on her first night with him.”
Joe snorted. “Is that what the file says happened with Nadya?”
I had to repress a double take. Someone as remorselessly evil as Joe had been made out to be didn’t usually remember individual victims by name after this long. They might remember the acts, but generally the victim was so dehumanized in their mind that names weren’t part of the package.
“What did happen with Nadya, Joe?” I asked. “Why don’t you give me your side of the story?”
He didn’t answer at first, but kicked back on his bed in disgust. After a few moments of silence, he gave me an appraising look.
“Before I tell you,” he said, “I’ve just got one question for you.”
“Yes?”
“You got a cigarette?” He gave me an uneven grin. “Sometimes I get them from the orderlies. Calms me down a bit. Relieves the boredom. They even disabled the smoke detector, but what do you expect? I don’t think anyone cares if I burn to death in here.”
As it happens, I did have a very worn out old pack of cigarettes in one pocket. I scooped it out and handed him one of them, flicking my lighter on as he took his first drag. He let it out slowly, then smiled crookedly at me again.
“Thanks Doc,” he said. “I guess you might be alright.”
I smiled back, despite my confusion. “So…Nadya?”
“Right, Nadya.” Joe took another drag. “Well, I know this is what a lot of people say, but the thing is…she came onto me.”
Immediately, I felt skepticism rise. “I find that hard to believe, Joe. She was twelve. You were ten.”
“Yeah yeah, I know, it’s too young,” Joe said angrily, waving my comment away as if it were a fly, “but you think she knew that? Her dad had been fucking her since she was at least ten. I think she figured it was just what boys and girls do. Anyway, she told me she couldn’t sleep unless someone ‘put it in her’ first, and asked me to do it. Well, I was a kid, and I didn’t know any better. They don’t exactly give you the birds and bees talk in a place like this, y’know. So I did. But I guess I did it wrong, because she just started screaming, and the orderlies were right outside, so I couldn’t exactly get off her. And you think they were going to listen to me after what they thought they saw?”
He let another gust of smoke out through his teeth and rolled his eyes. “I shouldn’t complain, I guess, since at least I won’t die a virgin. Not how I’d have chosen to lose it, but we can’t have everything.”
Against my better judgment, I had to admit, the story sounded plausible. Still, there was too much to that file to all be misunderstandings. I pressed him further.
“Even if I believe you, Joe,” I said, “it’s not like that’s the only thing. Your doctors keep dying or going nuts.”
“And you think I’m doing it?” Joe asked. He waved at his body in exasperation. “Do I look threatening to you, doctor?”
“No,” I said, “but if you’re gaslighting them…”
“Gaslighting? Bullshit. They didn’t kill themselves because I was crazy. They killed themselves because they, and everyone who ever worked on my case, knew I was sane.”
My jaw dropped before I could think to stop it. Seeing this, Joe guffawed.
“Oh, I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous, but you can believe me, it’s true. Has been since the second time my asshole parents left me here to get me out of their hair and told the doctors to come up with a reason to keep me. Well, like the greedy fucks they were, they made shit up, but at least they knew what a farce it all was at first. Before she came along.”
He growled low in his throat and spat on the ground before continuing. “You know what I was going to be before your precious little Dr. G----- worked here, doc? I was going to be the bitch case. That smug prick Dr. A------ made it more or less official policy that only the lowest ranking doctors would be assigned to work on me because no one wanted to do therapy with a sane patient who was being kept here purely at his parents’ request. Chalk it up to my bad luck that Dr. G----- was the first one to get that assignment. Because let me tell you, Dr. G-----? She was too ambitious to waste her time with that. So what does she do? She spins a little tale about how terrifying I am to work with, and leaves a suicide note about it just where the other doctors will find it, and next thing you know, she gets sick leave, gets to work on real patients when she gets back, and I go from being the case no one cares about to being the case no one dares to talk to. So what do they do? They start sending the doctors who they want to fire to work on me, as an excuse to get rid of them. Those poor fuckers knew as soon as they talked to me that if they failed to cure me, that bitch and her cold fish mentor would make sure their careers would be over, but that they couldn’t possibly do it because there was nothing to cure. The ones who lasted the longest were the ones who were able to talk themselves into drawing a paycheck just to spite this place. The longer they could live with that, the longer they stuck around. And I had to watch the only people who cared about me even slightly lose their minds in the process.”
I still had doubts, but for some reason, the more Joe talked, the more my heart went out to him. If I had to guess at what made him so sympathetic, it’d have to be his demeanor. I’m not really getting it across here, but even though he was technically defending himself, his voice still sounded hollow and resigned, like he knew that even if I believed him, it wouldn’t help anything. Like he was just giving his defense on autopilot. And because there was so little hope in what he was saying, it made me more inclined to believe he was being honest. I should’ve recognized that this could just as easily be a psychopath’s manipulation, in retrospect, but remember: I was only a resident at the time.
Anyway, I spent another forty five minutes talking to Joe, trying to see if I could spot any sign of latent insanity, before I finally had to go attend to other patients. When I closed the door to his cell, I felt sick, though not for any of the reasons I had expected. The fact was that despite every horrifying story his file contained, I saw absolutely no evidence that this man was anything other than a desperately lonely scapegoat, abandoned by his parents and made into an underfunded, understaffed hospital’s resident freak. Under the circumstances, I would have ordinarily recommended his release to my superior, but if even part of Joe’s story was true, that obviously would’ve been a terrible decision. If he was right, then this hospital wasn’t going to let a cash cow like him go, even if he was sane.
However, not being completely gullible, I decided I’d give myself another month of sessions with him before I decided to do anything drastic. Perhaps I’d simply caught him on a good day, and in a little while he’d transform into the nightmare channeling fiend I’d seen depicted in his file. Besides, I still hadn’t listened to the audiotapes in his full file, nor had I looked at the notes from the attending physicians that had been redacted.
I decided to start with the audiotapes, since the first session with Joe – when he ostensibly was only suffering from night terrors – might give me some clues that other doctors had missed because of its seeming banality. Since my fiancé had to study for first semester finals at her college that night, I decided to spend the evening going over whatever I could.
The audiotape of Joe’s first session was old and more than a little warped, and I was worried that it wouldn’t play when I popped it into my cassette player. However, after a few disconcerting grinding and whirring noises, the spools of the tape began to move, and the sound of a tinny, Mid Atlantic tinged man’s voice flowed from my speakers.
Hello Joe, my name is Dr. A------. Your parents tell me you have trouble sleeping.
There was a brief interval in which I imagined Joe must have nodded, because Dr. A------ went on speaking.
Could you tell me why that is?
Another brief pause, then a child’s voice answered.
The thing in my walls won’t let me.
What followed was pretty much exactly what had been described in the file, though I will say that when Joe first described the “thing in his walls,” I let out an involuntary shudder. It was apparently some sort of disgusting worm and spider hybrid with segmented eyes and long finger-like appendages that ate negative emotions. However, aside from the obviously disturbing nature of this monster, it seemed that Joe was just your typical imaginative child. Dr. A------ explained patiently that the monster was simply something Joe had created through his own imagination, and that he could control it if he wanted to. Of course, he told Joe this with the kind of toned down language and potty humor that would register most successfully with a six-year-old, and by the end, Joe was laughing and promising he’d tell the monster to its face that he wasn’t scared of it the next time it troubled him. I couldn’t help but crack a smile. Brave kid.
Now, before you ask, yes, I did transcribe the tape for future reference. However, unlike the paper files I still have, that document’s on an old, beaten-up laptop that I purposefully left behind in a storage locker after all this concluded. I’ll probably go back and get the thing and see if it still works well enough to get the file, but what with it just being Christmas, I haven’t been able to make myself go back and do it. I’ll get around to it at some point, but just now, I want to focus on getting through this part of the story. If you’re desperate for details, don’t worry, I’ll have plenty of excuses to drop them in down the line. Not that I’m looking forward to it, but just so you don’t bitch at me too much.
Anyway, back to my initial prep session. After listening to that first tape, the only thing to do next was to listen to the tape of the orderly’s experiences.
Upon first looking at it, I did notice something that at first seemed odd. A narrow strip of what looked like very old masking tape had been plastered to it with the words “3 AM – 4 AM” written on it. I was puzzled. Why only record one hour? Then it hit me. The file mentioned that the recording had been mostly silent. This must be the only tape that contained anything of interest. Otherwise, why preserve it? Prepping myself to listen very hard for something over the next hour, I pushed the tape in and hit “Play.”
It was, as I suspected, almost nothing but dead air for the first twenty minutes, and more than once, I had to stop myself zoning out. Eventually I resorted to counting the seconds under my breath, periodically looking at my watch as a means of making sure I stayed attentive to something. Yet, when I hit the twenty minute mark, the tape seemed to come to life, and I did hear something.
First, there was the sound of breathing that I’d seen mentioned in the file. Dr. A------ hadn’t exaggerated: this was undoubtedly the sound of someone having an anxiety attack. The breathing went on for about thirty seconds before I heard the sound of something shifting and then…
Footsteps. Fast footsteps, as if someone were running, followed by the smack of something soft on something hard. Throughout, I heard heavy breathing, presumably of the person who’d just been running, then a rough voice muttering several obscene words over and over again in increasingly terrified accents. Then, there was the sound of shuffling footsteps, and abruptly, at only 30 minutes, the recording seemed to completely cut off.
Annoyed, I rewound it. It was obvious what I had heard. The orderly had clearly been too freaked out to stay the whole night, and had made a run for it. That is, assuming the notes were accurate. He might have just decided to go home and faked the scares to keep the legend of Joe alive. However, just to be sure, I thought I should listen to the ten minutes of activity again, just to make sure I hadn’t misheard. This time, I pulled out a set of headphones and plugged them into the cassette player, and turned the volume as high as it would go without hurting my ears. Then, I listened.
Again, the same sounds. The rapid-fire, anxious breathing. The sound of a shifting body. The running footsteps. The swearing. The laughter. The shuffling walk out of the hospital.
Hang on. Laughter? That hadn’t been there before. I rewound the tape again and listened.
At a lower volume, the sound easily could’ve been mistaken for background noise. But through headphones cranked up that high, it was almost indubitable. While the orderly swore into his mic, between the gaps in his uttered epithets, I thought I could hear the sound of a low, rumbling chuckle in the background, as if it was being picked up from a great distance. But even from a distance, I could tell that the sound must have been far louder in person to have carried into the mic. If not for the poor quality of the recording, which made me doubt its authenticity, I’d probably have been freaked out enough to drop the case right there.
You see, that laugh did not sound like any sound a person should be able to produce. It was too hoarse, too low, and too guttural, almost like someone had given the rhythm of a human laugh to the sound of a glacier collapsing. But then, it was far away, and the recording was very old, so for all I knew, it was just something innocuous in the background that had gotten warped by years of disuse. I ejected the tape, figuring there was nothing else I could learn from it, and settled down to have a look at the notes.
These I will not bother transcribing, and the reason is this: If I’d thought there was any chance that Joe had been mistaken that he was being deliberately given the worst doctors in the hospital before reading them, I was convinced afterwards. These were some of the most disjointed, unhelpful, and frankly incoherent notes I’d read in my life. They jumped from diagnosis to diagnosis, and medication to medication, seemingly on a dime, until I began to wonder if Joe might have just been slowly driven insane by all the different side effects. Some made reference to having him restrained, or even muzzled during therapy, which seemed completely counterproductive to me. I mean, what’s the point of talk therapy if the patient can’t talk back? Suffice to say, by the end, I was all but certain that these people were just taking out their frustrations with their own medical ineptitude on a helpless patient, and I shuddered to think how many malpractice lawsuits could’ve been filed on the basis of what I’d read.
The only notes I could even begin to follow were the ones written by Dr. G----- herself, and while they did show a highly competent physician at work, at the end of the day, they all but confirmed Joe’s hypothesis. Dr. G-----‘s notes were very dismissive at first, and I could practically hear the resentment in every sentence she wrote about him. It was obvious that she thought this was a patient entirely beneath her, and that she wanted desperately to be reassigned. Yet, as the notes went on, the resentment seemed to bleed out of her tone and be replaced with an extreme sense of triumph. At the same time, they got shorter and shorter, as if she got more and more certain that she wouldn’t need notes because the case was so close to being fixed. This is a good example:
Joe responding well to final treatment. Will check back in a week, if the process even takes that long to work.
Well, whatever ‘final treatment’ she referred to definitely bore some sort of results. You see, exactly a week after that brief, almost flippant aside, there was her final memo, which was so different it was almost whiplash-inducing. That memo I will transcribe here.
From: Dr. G----- To: Dr. A------
Effective tomorrow, I am resigning my post at (hospital name redacted). I have failed my patients, failed my colleagues, and failed myself. Nothing can ever make up for it. Please do not bother sending my last paycheck, as I don’t deserve it, and don’t expect to need it. Thank you for the opportunity to work with you, and I am sorry I let you down so thoroughly. I am sorry. So so sorry. -Rose
Needless to say, this seemed suspicious. True, Dr. G----- could’ve merely picked a disastrously wrong “final” treatment, but in view of what I’d read and heard, it seemed far more likely that she’d intended that only to be the “final treatment” that she would perform on Joe, because of her plan to fake her own suicide. Otherwise, why would her notes be so short on details about her seemingly successful treatment?
This, from my perspective, was almost the final nail in the “mystery patient no one can cure” theory’s coffin. Though I still resolved to give Joe a month’s worth of observation, I was already beginning to wonder what it would take to prove to some higher authority in the world of medicine just how much abuse this one poor man had suffered at the hands of the unethical and callous Dr. G-----. In fact, if I’d thought I might have overlooked something when I’d heard the phantom laughter on the tape earlier, I now wondered if the tape had somehow been altered, since Dr. G----- had been the one holding onto it. Either way, from where I sat, it was Joe who’d been living in a nightmare, not his orderlies, and not his doctors.
In fact, this revelation cast Nessie’s suicide in a whole new light: That kindly old woman simply hadn’t had it in her to keep torturing this poor man, and yet hadn’t been able to tear herself away from a hospital that had been home for so long. So she’d killed herself and tried to warn everyone away from him to prevent them from suffering the same guilt. And all because one cruel woman had been simply too arrogant and too ambitious to handle being given a dud case for her first assignment.
Even so, on some level, I felt relieved. This was a horror story alright, but at least it seemed like it probably had a human monster. And if Dr. G----- was the monster I suspected, then by the time this was over, I vowed that I was going to put a stake through her heart.
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Otis Jiry