Vanished

Chapter 6

“Yeah, um Clar I may have lied to you just a tiny bit, I wanted to see your reaction when I told you that we were in Paris because I kind of wanted to take you there after we graduate, I’m so sorry.”

“That’s alright Daisy, I just thought it was a bit weird. Wait, hang on, if we aren’t in Paris what was that building we were at the top of?”

“Clara, we’re in Italy, it was just some random monument I found when I searched ‘high-rise monuments in Italy’ on Google, to be honest I don’t even know the real name of the monument,” Daisy explained.

“Oh wow, thank you for the explanation, my whole life makes complete sense now! Maybe I should write a book about it!” I replied.

“Okay, I’m going to ignore the sarcasm in your tone and buy you a book so that you can publish a book when we get home.”

“Seriously, I was kidding, why would I write a book? I can’t even finish the ones they assign us in English, let alone write one!”

“It’d be such a great story Clara! However it turns out! People would love to hear about our experience with the snakes and how you got shipped off half way across the world in a box that was meant to house me! It’ll sell really well! We might even be millionaires before high school is over!”

“What if we don’t even get back alive? Huh? What if they have to fly our bodies back in some massive refrigerated plane?” I point out, “We have no idea what we might encounter on this journey Daisy!”

“That!” Daisy replied.

“What?” I said, confused.

“The last bit that you just said would be perfect for a book! It’s all dramatic and it’ll make people go ‘dayum those girls must’ve been brave!’”

“Yeah okay Daisy but I don’t know if you heard me; We. Might. Not. Come. Back. Alive.”

“That’s only one minor default Clar.” I sighed heavily, obviously this whole ordeal was affecting me a whole lot more than it was affecting Daisy.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

As we were walking through the deserted streets we stopped at a large abandoned hospital. It was made entirely of bricks on the outside as the windows had been smashed out; it had a very eerie feel to it. Daisy started walking towards the building.

“Daisy, are you crazy? I’m not going in there!” I said anxiously.

“Of course you are! This is where I planned for us to stay.” Daisy replied.

“Oh gosh, if you keep planning for us to spend our nights in creepy abandoned hospitals we will definitely die before we get home.”

“You mean creepy abandoned hospitals for the insane,” She corrected me.

“Are you serious? Don’t they call those mental hospitals now?”

“Yep, I’m pretty sure they do except the ones around now are much less creepy and eerie.”

“Well, this is not going to be very pleasant is it?”

I was right; it was not pleasant at all. As we entered the hospital, even though it was pitch black I could see spider webs in every corner of the ceiling; shining in the moonlight. We continued walking through the entrance and found that the whole place looked as though it had been abandoned in a hurry, as if aliens had come and they were going to be abducted. There were pens still on a desk, even patient’s records open in the patients rooms, the sheets on the beds were all still there and ruffled up, and the worst part out of all of those, the one that freaked me out the most, was the fact that the beds had straps on them, straps that I can imagine were used to hold the patients down for the doctors to complete horrible experiments on them. I found it awfully strange that so many things could be so well preserved, it literally looked as if everyone just dropped what they were doing and left, it was very, very odd.

Daisy and I turned a corner and were faced with an impossibly long hallway, I figured that these were more of the rooms that had held patients all those years ago and were completely empty now, but I was wrong.

We were not alone.

There was a young girl of about five or six standing alone in a completely empty room. I tapped Daisy’s shoulder, pointed at the girl and quickly checked some of the other rooms around me which were all empty except for a bed and a small wooden table and chair.

“Hello little girl, what’s your name?” I could hear Daisy say from the other room; I rushed over to see what was going on.

“Mamma, mamma is gone. Papa is gone. Nurses are gone. Doctors are gone. Patients are gone. Everyone is gone. No one to help me. No one to help me.” The girl replied.

She looked around the room as if it was completely empty, not noticing that we were here, in the room with her. The little girl stood up and FLOATED over to a bath that I swore was not here when we came in.

The bath was filled with blood.

The girl sat in the tub, in her torn rags that seemed to suffice as clothing and started to wash herself in the blood.

I was horrified.

The girl was not a girl but a ghost. She was the ghost of a girl who died here long ago, when the building was abandoned. That’s what she was talking about before; she had been left behind for some reason when everybody left the hospital, forgotten in the blink of an eye.

The ghost girl spoke again, “Can’t live, must die, not good enough. That’s why everyone left me, they don’t care, no one cares, they want me to die, they all live, I die, I die, I die,” and just like that she found a knife in the tub of blood and slit her own throat and sinks into the blood. How is that even possible, no one can even slit their own throat I think, your brain stops you, but then I remember that she must’ve been here for a reason.

I turn to Daisy and she looks at me with her eyes wide, so wide I don’t know how she’s doing it and I grab her arm and pull her from the room.

“If there’s one thing I know, it’s that I am not staying here tonight and there is nothing you can say to change my mind, agreed?”

“Agreed,” Daisy whispers back, her voice squeaky.

I had never believed in ghosts, ever, but I guess now I don’t have an excuse; I’ve seen one in real life and I hope that I never have to become a ghost reliving the final moments of my life over and over again.

“Holy shit,” Daisy yells, pointing at a wall at the entrance of the hospital.

“Oh my God, okay we need to get out of here now before I go insane and need to be moved into a mental hospital,” Tears started to roll down my face, never had I ever been scared to tears in my life.

I take one more look at the wall before we walk out of the building, there is a massive S painted in red on the wall and the way that it glints in the moonlight, I come to the realisation that it’s wet and it’s too thick to be paint, I scream in horror of my discovery.

S had painted this wall only a few minutes ago and S had painted the wall with blood.