The Story of the Black Dogs

Chapter 4.1

      "Charles."

     "Charles, please wake up."

     Charles' eyes peeled open at the sound of his wife's voice. But as consciousness greeted him, the soft voice of his wife faded away until the only sound that was left was the eerie ticking of a clock.

     Charles's eyes slowly drifted around the room he was in. The room was bathed in a soft glow as sunlight trickled in through a large window to the left of him. In the corner, on a grey chair, hung his bloody jacket. When he glanced down at himself, he found that he was lying in a hospital bed.

     *Tick

     *Tick

     *Tick

     Charles's eyes drifted to the source of the sound. On the wall ahead of him, hung a familiar black clock. Each tick brought him out of his groggy state as he remembered the ghostly nurse and that giant smoky creature.

     *Tick

     *Tick

     *Tick

     Charles shot up from his bed and only stopped because of the pain that shot up his arm. Looking at it, he saw thick bandages wrapped around his arm, where the bite should be. He looked at his arm in confusion.

     "When did it get bandaged?" he said to himself. For the life of him, he couldn't figure out how. "After all the hospital-"

     Charles's thoughts came to a stop as he took in the environment around him. Voices of nurses and patients could be heard outside, and everything around him seemed intact. Looking at himself, there was no form of debris on him despite still wearing the same clothes.

     'What about the nurse? The creature?' he thought. 'Did that even happen at all? Or was it just a dream? Must be. Right?'

     Charles crawled out of the hospital bed and made his way over to the bathroom. He turned on the water to the sink, hoping to wash his face and clear his head. With his mind reeling the way it was, he wasn't going to figure out anything.

     He splashed cool water on his face and rubbed his brow, in an attempt to push away some of the stress that he was under. Just for a moment, a single moment, he glanced at his reflection in the mirror, and what he saw terrified him to no end.

     His reflection wasn't what he expected it to be, which was a man with a face filled with stress and worry. No. Instead, he was met with bruised and swollen eyes that were barely visible under bandages. His nose was purple and crooked and there was a huge gash on the side of his face with visible stitches. A tube hung from his mouth and a breathing mask covered his face.

     Charles jumped back from his reflection as his hands frantically began to dart across his face, but he felt nothing of the injuries he had just seen.

     His chest rose and fell with heavy breaths as he slowly crept back toward the mirror. Taking a moment to compose himself, he once again took a look at his reflection and found that it was normal, but still, it didn't change the fact that he was shaken.

     He heard the door to the hospital room closing with a click. Someone had just stepped into the room.

     "Mr. Morris?"

     The sound of the feminine voice was bright and somewhat familiar. But Charles couldn't put his finger on who the voice may belong to.

     Charles slowly walked out of the bathroom, to see who had called him, and when he did he froze.

The voice belonged to none other than that ghostly nurse that Charles had met before, but she didn't look the same as she did when they had just met. Instead of dark and sunken, her eyes looked vibrant and full of life. Her figure no longer seemed bony and frail, and her cheeks were full of color.

     But still, he couldn't forget the sound of her raspy voice or the sight of her creepy smile. Charles might as well have seen her as the ghostly apparition he had seen before.

     Charles rushed from the room, nearly pushing the nurse aside as he fled. He heard various doctors and nurses calling out to him, but he ignored them as his only goal now was to leave that creepy town.

     He rushed past people that were walking through the lobby, nearly knocking a few people over but he didn't care. He pushed through the glass doors and ran through the parking lot to where he had parked his truck.

     It was gone.

     The area where he had parked his truck was completely empty.

     Unwilling to accept this fact, Charles wandered around the lot, looking for his truck, but to no avail. There was no truck in sight.

     Frustrated and scared, Charles ran back into the hospital and went to a nurse at a desk. "My truck. There was a truck outside. Where is it!"

     But the nurse didn't answer. No one did. No one even looked at him, and it was just as it was when he first arrived.

     He grabbed the nurse's shoulders and shook him. But he still didn't reply. He then turned around and looked at an elderly man and woman that was walking by and went to stand directly in their path. Without even giving Charles a glance, they went around him, and when Charles saw this, he grabbed the elderly man's arm. The man simply stopped moving, but he didn't acknowledge Charles at all. Neither did the woman as she continued forward without her husband.

     "Hehehehehe." A familiar laugh filled the hospital lobby, and even without looking, Charles knew who it was.

     Sitting him on a sofa petting a black dog was a grimy old man with hole-ridden clothes, wearing a long dirty grey jacket and orange skullcap.

     The old man was smiling, showing off his few blackened teeth. "Looking for something Charles."