A sample chapter from the novel Disassociation by Dan Stein.

1991
John Gets Sedated

         This chess piece debacle is getting out of hand, Mrs. Latham thought. As head nurse of Kellington Dale Mental Hospital, she had had to deal with the eccentricies of lunatics for years, but the uproar that the missing white king had caused was ridiculous.

         Everyone knew that Kip loved chess. It bordered on an obsession with him and had ever since he’d arrived at the hospital three years ago. He had been admitted for chronic depression and a compulsion to mutilate himself, the worst of which was his missing tongue. Chess seemed to alleviate Kip’s depression, so Mrs. Latham had allowed the obsessive playing.

         Kip’s chronic chess playing had been working fine until four days ago. Kip had just finished his breakfast, and was going about his usual routine of setting up the chess board in the game room, which, for observational purposes, was right outside the nurses’ station. Mrs. Latham had been on duty, readying the patients’ medications when Kip had begun mewling loudly. Mrs. Latham had heard that sound before; it was a clear indication that Kip was upset about something. Without a tongue it was difficult to express yourself, and Kip usually remained quiet. Only extreme stress evoked sound from him. She had entered the game room to find out what Kip’s problem was, and had found him gazing furiously at the chess board.

          “What is it, Kip?” she had asked, trying to project a calm, reassuring air, but feeling more irritated than sympathetic.

         Kip had gestured angrily, stabbing a quivering finger over and over at the chess board, his mewling growing in volume. Mrs. Latham had looked at the board, not initially realizing what Kip meant. Then she had noticed a blank square and realized what his problem was.

          “The white king is missing?” she’d asked.

         Kip had nodded, brown eyes looking near tears, but mercifully having grown quiet.

          “Don’t worry, Kip. We’ll find it. It probably just got put in one of the other game’s boxes.”

         Kip had given her a doubtful look. After all, he was the only one that ever used the chess set, so he would have been the one to put it away. It had been obvious to Mrs. Latham that Kip didn’t think that a simple mistake was possible.

         Mrs. Latham and Kip had gone through the games. She had hoped to get the issue resolved quickly and get back to her work. It hadn’t turned out that way. That had been four days ago.

         Since then, Kip had nearly been in a frenzy, often having to be restrained to keep him from trying to frisk the other patients in search of the chess piece. Mrs. Latham had been forced to conclude one of the other patients must have taken it. This was an annoying breach in the order Mrs. Latham enforced. Over the course of the last four days, she had run the gamut of techniques to try and draw the thief out. Promises of reward, threats of punishment; nothing had worked. Mrs. Latham was about ready to just buy a new chess set, but the principle of the thing really irked her. Order needed to be maintained, and this thief was a threat to that and to her authority.

         Yes, this chess piece debacle was getting out of hand.

         Mrs. Latham was updating her files when it finally came to a head.

         Kip went from sulking at the incomplete chess board to intense rage in an instant. He leapt up from his chair, knocking it over and drawing the attention of the other patients in the game room. Mrs. Latham looked up just in time to see him tackle another patient, a John Doe that had been admitted recently. Kip dragged the much thinner Doe to the ground and began clubbing his back and head, mewling at the top of his lungs.

          “Jesus,” Mrs. Latham muttered and then raised her voice to a shout, “Derek! Neil! Get in here!”

         She and a young nurse named Jeanie jogged out of the nurses’ station as the orderlies Mrs. Latham had called came running down the hall.

          “No!” the John Doe screamed at Kip. He wasn’t fighting back, choosing instead to keep his fists clenched to his chest in a distinctly protective gesture. “You can’t take the King! You’ll bring them here!”

          “I think we found the missing chess piece,” Jeanie commented as they drew closer. Mrs. Latham realized she was right as she caught a glimpse of something small and white in the John Doe’s hand. So he was the cause of all this disorder.

          “Jeanie, bring me a sedative,” Mrs. Latham commanded. The other nurse turned around and returned to the nurses’ station. Mrs. Latham pressed forward, barging through the crowd of patients that had gathered around to witness the excitement. She arrived shortly after the orderlies, who were trying in vain to separate the two.

          “Come on, Kip!” Derek, the big, black orderly was yelling at them. The other orderly, Neil, was trying to pull the John Doe out from under Kip. “Stop it!”

         The Doe was crying and wailing, but wouldn’t relinquish his hold on the piece. His blue eyes were rimmed red, and his brown hair was matted to his forehead with sweat. Mrs. Latham wasn’t sure, but she thought the Doe was still blubbering about things coming to get him. This was completely unacceptable, and the John Doe was going to pay for this infraction.

          “Kip!” Mrs. Latham shouted in her best authoritarian voice. “You get off him this instant or Derek will have to get the jacket. You don’t want that, do you?”

         Kip looked up at her, his fists still pumping, his glare enraged. Slowly, reluctantly, his fists grew still and he relented, the threat having served its purpose.

          “That’s good, buddy,” Derek said to Kip. “Just stay calm, okay?”

         Kip nodded, his expression looking slightly ashamed as he stood up and backed off from the John Doe.

         The Doe was still wailing and lying on the floor. Through the entire battering he hadn’t loosened his grip. Blood from where his fingernails had cut into his palms was flowing onto the white tile floor.

          “John,” Mrs. Latham called above his wailing. “John! You know that that piece doesn’t belong to you. It’s for all the patients to share. Give it to me.”

         The John Doe’s wailing grew to an ungodly volume, his voice threatening to break. “No! You don’t understand! They’ll kill you all! They’ll get me! I have to keep the King!”

         Jeanie returned with the sedative Mrs. Latham had requested. “Are we gonna need this?” she asked.

          “We’ll see,” Mrs. Latham answered. “John, give me the chess piece,” Mrs. Latham repeated and extended her hand.

         The Doe reacted violently, suddenly leaping up and throwing himself against the wall. He screamed inarticulately and began swinging his fists wildly at the orderlies.

          “Restrain him!” Mrs. Latham yelled at the orderlies.

         Derek stepped forward and caught the Doe’s arm in mid-swing. He followed it through and pressed the Doe’s arm up against the wall. The John Doe cried out and drew his other fist back to strike Derek, but Neil was there to catch it and pin it to the wall too. The Doe started kicking wildly, catching Derek’s shins. Neil kicked his standing leg out from under him and forced him into a sitting position. Derek grabbed the arm Neil was holding, and Neil bent down to keep the Doe’s legs still.

          “Jeanie, give me the sedative,” Mrs. Latham commanded. Once Jeanie had placed the syringe in her hand, she walked up to the panicked man and searched for a vein in his arm.

          “No! Please, no!” the Doe pleaded.

         Mrs. Latham didn’t bother to respond. She simply sank the syringe into the most prominent vein in his left arm and pressed the plunger. The Doe screamed as the needle entered his arm, and tried to thrash out of the orderlies’ grip. For a second, Mrs. Latham was afraid he was going to break the needle off in his arm, but Derek and Neil got him under control quickly and within moments the John Doe had lapsed into unconsciousness.

          “Well,” Mrs. Latham said, annoyed. “That’s finally over with. Derek, put this man in a straightjacket and confine him to his room. Let me know when he wakes up; I want to talk to him.”

          “Yes, ma’am,” Derek said, and went to retrieve a straightjacket.

         Mrs. Latham uncurled the John Doe’s hand and retrieved the white king. She handed it to Kip, who thanked her with his eyes. Mrs. Latham didn’t care one lick about Kip’s thanks, and was just glad the whole mess was over.

         Mrs. Latham got up and went back to the nurse’s station to call Dr. Stanz, who was handling the John Doe. As she dialed, Derek came back with the straight jacket. Derek and Neil put the coat on the unresisting Doe. Dr. Stanz’ voice mail picked up while the orderlies buckled the jacket. They lifted John up, and began to walk with him out of the game room.

         Mrs. Latham left a message for the doctor, “Dr. Stanz. This is Head Nurse June Latham. I’m calling to let you know we had an altercation involving the John Doe. I had to have him restrained. Please, call the nurses’ station as soon as you…” She stopped speaking abruptly as she noticed the inky things appearing out of the floor. Am I hallucinating? she thought.

         The creatures were like nothing Mrs. Latham had ever seen. They were all different shapes and colors, predominantly red or black. Some oozed yellow ichor as their inky forms grew solid. They had mouths and eyes, but rarely in places that made sense to the human mind and rarely in a number that appeared in nature. Limbs jutted out of their bulbous forms at random intervals. Some had hands, others claws and hooves. Some flew or floated. Quite a few skittered on insect legs, and still more walked upright, not like people, but more like an animal that has been taught to do so as a trick. None of them made a sound; they just poured out of cracks in the floor and walls that had suddenly appeared, no longer inky forms taking shape, but fully developed and obviously hungry.

         Mrs. Latham stared incredulously at these horrific things that spat and stalked. This can’t be; it doesn’t make sense, she thought. It isn’t ordered. She started suddenly when a scream came from the hall where the orderlies had taken the John Doe. It sounded like Neil’s voice, but she had never expected such a high pitched squeal to escape such a large man’s lips. The scream was suddenly transformed into a gurgle. Blood in his throat, Mrs. Latham thought, eerily disconnected from the terror that that thought and these creatures should have inspired.

         All at once the game room became pandemonium as the creatures attacked the patients around them. The patients finally screamed and although Mrs. Latham had thought herself accustomed to the screams of madmen, she found that the yells chilled her terribly. The patients howled like the damned as the creatures tore into them with claw, tooth, and other unidentifiable appendages.

         Mrs. Latham dropped the phone and found that her legs had become unexplainably wet and warm. Oh dear, she thought, I’ve wet myself.

         Derek ran past the nurse’s station, panicked and apparently not taking in the carnage around him. He fled down the hall as Mrs. Latham started to fully understand what she was seeing. She had dealt for so long with people who suffered from hallucinations, but had never experienced one herself. Her rational brain had suggested at first that this must be what was happening, a hallucination. But it wasn’t, was it? Was it?

         As the unordered creatures feasted, Mrs. Latham vaguely noticed that the interior of the game room was beginning to change from the sedate, beige color it normally was. The lights had turned a sickly shade of red that cast a hellish glow over an already terrifying scene. The paint had chipped and peeled as though a great heat had struck it. The furniture had taken on the characteristics of living things. She saw a jagged mouth had evolved from the back of the leather couch. It doesn’t look like leather, more like scales now, the stubborn part of her brain noted. It can’t; that just doesn’t happen, another part of her argued. The television that had been suspended from the ceiling no longer hung there by metal but rather by some kind of weird cocoon. Parts of the walls jutted at odd angles, and the holes that these things had appeared from widened. The hospital seemed less and less constructed of concrete and wood, but rather of flesh and bone.

         While Mrs. Latham surveyed the changed game room, one of the things turned towards her and brought its arm up in a throwing motion. Mrs. Latham didn’t have time to wonder what it had thrown at her. Before she could even process that the creature had acted, Jeanie’s head smacked hollowly against the window separating the station from the game room.

         It is real, it finally sank in. Mrs. Latham screamed and that sent what she was seeing home. There was no order to it, no rationality, but it was really happening.

         She grabbed the phone receiver again. “Oh my God! Help! Help us; something’s happening in the game room! These things are killing everyone! I don’t…” The sentence was left incomplete as Mrs. Latham gurgled as a serrated claw was thrust through her throat. She looked down and saw the blackened end of it extending over a foot out of her neck. Neil made that sound, Mrs. Latham thought as her body went into shock. Moments later she was dead as the thing that had taken her life began to chew on her arm.

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