The Unnaturals

Chapter 13

Back at my house, for the moment forgetting the argument I'd had with my dad, I jumped on my computer and started to research what we should have in the first place- the hospital. I realized that it had been foolish of us to go over there when we had no knowledge, or at least a layout, of the place. We had acted like amateurs and they had died for it. Now, I was going to make up for that.

After hours of research I finally came up with something viable. There had been a ton of stuff on it but I doubted much of it was true. What all of them had in common, to some extent, was this:

The Saint Jones Hospital, as it was called then, was a hospital like any other- except for one thing. They housed and treated the physically injured... of the mentally ill. Not all the patients were mentally ill- only about half, according to three different sources. The two sectors of patients were kept apart. The mentally ill were put towards the northern side and the western was occupied by normal care patients.

However, not everything was as peachy as it seemed. Apparently, one of the doctors thought he could cure the mentally ill of their impairments. He used to steal the patients from their rooms at night and put them in a room in the back of the hospital to do experiments on them.

Of course, it wasn't long before he was caught, at that instance trying to use electricity in certain quantities with a chemical on the wire that would burn into their skin to see if it would effect them in the way he wanted. He was arrested, and all seemed quiet for a while.

But then one of the doctor's protégés decided to continue his work, and one day went to extreme measures. He took the mentally ill patients one by one and put them in that same room, where he locked the door, broke the key, and told his co-workers he would gas the room and kill them all if they didn't get out. They filed toward the door, and he locked the building down, himself still inside along with the patients still on the westernmost side. Then he gassed the room that he'd locked the mentally ill people in, with the intent of curing them, but the untested substance backfired, amplifying their illnesses and manipulating the activity in their brains and basically making them high with hallucinations and dulling their consciousnesses until they became more animal-like than human, turning into a vicious mob.They worked themselves into a frenzy, attacking each other and the walls, until enough of them got their senses about them enough to realize the door was the way out.

Eventually their sheer force broke down the door, and they mobbed the doctor, killing and mutilating his body, and then going after the other patients. With no way out, everyone in there died at their hands.

Afterwards, the police got in the reinforced doors and opened fire after seeing the man's mutilated body and the state of the now-rabid people. The other doctors, nurses and hospital owners closed down after that, and tried to sell. But believing the building to be cursed, no one would buy, and eventually they declared bankruptcy and left it, empty, and abandoned.

Now it all made sense. Why I had felt what I did, when I was in the building, and what had happened in that room with all the scratch marks on it. I tried to imagine how they must have felt, those doctors, to want to "cure" someone so badly they'd do such horrible things, go to such extremes, and I couldn't. It was the doctors who were insane, I thought. Those people must have been terrified; no one had a right to use anyone like that.

Laying back in my bed, for it was almost one in the morning, I closed my eyes and instantly fell asleep, dreaming of ghosts and empty rooms.