GUYANESE HORROR FICTION KAMARANG…TAKEN TO THE DEATH WARD

May 18, 2020 News

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He thought again about the array of love-bites on Michael’s chest. No…those weren’t marks of love…those were marks inflicted by some frenzied, voracious thing. He flinched as the image of a wide, sensuous and cruel mouth came to him. Who is she, boy? This woman who has you like this?

By Michael Jordan

Lionel Jones, sitting with his wife at the living room window, watched the shiny black car enter his street, and stop outside his house.
A hearse…Michael!
Then his mind registered that the car was a Morris Oxford. The back door opened.
“Oh God!” his wife cried out. “Is Michael!” as his son staggered out of the car—and Lionel broke for the stairs.
*
Laura Jones watched as the driver leaned back, pulled the door shut, looked up at her, then drove off. She watched as her son weaved his way towards the gate, held onto it, then slowly collapsed just as his father reached him. *
Lionel Jones could not recall going downstairs, and opening the gate, but there he was, by his son, as the dogs howled. He lifted his son into the patio, then into the house, and placed him in one of the living room chairs; his wife, hovering nearby, wringing her hands.
“Turn on the light,” he said.
She switched on the living room light.
Lionel Jones heard himself mutter “Christ”, and heard his wife cry out.
Michael’s eyes were slightly open, but his stare vacant. His breathing was shallow—rapid. His skin was an unpleasant grey; his lips had a bluish tinge.
“Michael?”
The boy’s lips moved, but no words came.
“Michael! —Michael!” his mother called.
Nothing—just that rapid breathing.
Was he injured? Lionel pulled back the windbreaker and lifted Michael’s jersey. An overpowering woman-scent, and a fermented odour assailed him. A mass of red bruises stood out stark on his son’s chest. The sight of them sent a tremor of fear and revulsion through him.
Keep calm…..think!
Remembering some vague first aid advice he had read somewhere, he placed two cushions under his son’s legs. He was unaware that his wife had left his side until she returned with a bottle of Limacol. She uncorked it, poured some in her hands and began to apply it to Michael’s face. The boy’s eyes cleared. He emitted a weak cough. He stared at them and tried to rise, but slumped back, body slack, eyes shut, as if the effort had used up all his strength.
He’s dying!
He mustn’t panic. “Stay with him, Laura! I’m taking him to the hospital,”
*
He was lying on his back as two porters lifted him onto a gurney. They then wheeled him into the Georgetown Hospital’s Emergency Room, while his father spoke to a nurse at a table. Then someone wheeled him into another room filled with hospital smells, and lifted him onto a cot in a cubicle surrounded by green plastic curtains. Hospital sounds came to him. A child’s hysterical screaming. Someone retching, accompanied by the combined stench of vomit and an unpleasant-smelling insecticide his dad had once used.
Now his mother, anxious, hovered nearby.
“You alright, boy?” Her voice seemed to come from a distance. His head still buzzed from the strange dizziness that had brought him here.
“Yes.” Not meeting her eyes.
She was about to say something more, when his father, accompanied by a short, bearded man with a stethoscope, came to his cot. The doctor glanced at a medical form he held in one hand, then looked at Michael.
“Michael…Jones?”
“Yes.”
“How are you feeling now? You think you can sit?”
He tried to sit, but a wave of dizziness overcame him, and he collapsed back onto the cot.
“First time this happened?”
He nodded, eyes shut to blot out the nausea and the crazily spinning room.
“He went to the doctor the other day for this same weakness,” his mother interjected. “He was supposed to be resting.”
“You were tested for hookworms?”
He nodded again. The doctor’s questions brought back the same dread he’d felt at Doctor Mootoo’s clinic.
What is wrong with me?
“You were tested for ulcers…piles?”
He nodded again, then opened his eyes as someone touched his arm. A long-haired nurse, who sniffled as if she had a cold, stood by the cot with a syringe in her hand. She wrapped a rubber tube around his left bicep, and asked him to make a fist. He felt the prick of the needle as she pierced a vein and drew some blood. She gave him a cotton swab to press against the spot where she had pricked him, then moved away from the cot.
“We should get the results back from the lab in about an hour,” the doctor said.
“Meanwhile, we’ll set up a saline infusion for him.”
He heard his mother’s cry of alarm. He felt a spasm of dread that made him forget his dizziness. He opened his eyes to his parents’ anxious faces.
“It’s that serious?” his father asked.
“The saline contains iron for his anaemic condition. He needs iron in his bloodstream fast.” He looked at Michael. “You have any history of asthma or allergies?”
“No.”
“You ever have had a reaction to any type of iron injection or infusion in the past?”
“No.”
“So, we’ll set up the infusion. He’ll have to stay overnight…just as a precaution,” he added, as his mother started to say something. “I will let someone take him to the ward in a while.”
Michael watched the doctor head towards one of the cots from where he could still hear someone retching.
His father said: “We’re going to bring your pyjamas and other things.” He tried to smile. “Hang in there until we get back.”
He closed his eyes. He did not want to look at them, see the worry he had brought on them. He did not want them to read the confusion on his face; ask the questions that he himself had no answer to.
His father was saying something else, but now that blanket of weariness was upon him, pulling him into a deep, warm place…
*
Michael was still asleep when they returned. Now a saline needle was in his arm, one sleeve of the windbreaker rolled up to accommodate it. Lionel watched as his wife woke Michael to change into the pyjama trousers, watched the effort that it took him to put them on.
He thought again about the array of love-bites on Michael’s chest. No…those weren’t marks of love…those were marks inflicted by some frenzied, voracious thing.
He flinched as the image of a wide, sensuous and cruel mouth came to him.
Who is she, boy? This woman who has you like this?
As he stood there, the sound of wailing broke out, somewhere outside the Emergency Unit. He watched two porters wheel out a body that was wrapped in a white sheet.
“Poison case,” someone said.
He turned to see the bearded doctor.
“Just sixteen years old…” the doctor continued. “Has a father with one of the largest rice farms at Mahaica, and drinks malathion over some damn girl.”
The doctor turned and headed out of the ward. Lionel Jones hesitated, then followed him.
He saw the doctor heading to a parking lot in the compound.
The doctor, about to open the door of a blue Toyota, turned as he called out.
“Hi Mr. Jones. I’m about to go off. Another doctor will look at your boy.”
Lionel took a deep breath, then said:
“How is he doing?”
“We should be able to release him by tomorrow. I will prescribe some medication

for him, but he must rest. He is very anaemic.”
“And that is serious?”
“It could be, if it becomes really severe and isn’t treated. He could go into shock.”
He found himself shaking his head. “But I don’t understand. He eats well. He’s a health fanatic. He had no health problems whatsoever, until about two weeks ago.”
“We will know later today, when we get the rest of his results. But as I said, he has to rest.” He smiled. “Your son seems to be quite the ladies man.”
So, the doctor had noticed the love bites, and that smell…was it a week ago that he had smelt it on the boy?
Michael had almost certainly sneaked out to meet a woman…
…And collapsed after? That didn’t make sense. …
Now the doctor opened his car door.
“Ah doctor…which ward will you be taking him to?”
The doctor gestured to the east at an ancient, two-storey building, with a tower-clock. “There.”
He fought down a rush of panic. “That ward?”
“Yes.”
“Why that ward?”
“It’s the Medical Ward.”
He watched the doctor drive out of the compound. He turned to stare at the building, and even as he stared, two porters—he thought they might be the same porters that had taken the boy’s body out of the Emergency Unit—staggered down the stairs with another wrapped-up thing. He watched them dump the corpse onto a gurney, then wheel the squeaking gurney out of the compound.
He stood watching them a moment, then stared again at the building with the tower-clock, the building that they called the death ward, and if someone said you were under the clock, they meant that you were in this ward and you were dying, but he mustn’t panic, because he knew that this ward had gotten its bad name because most who died there were the elderly, and it had once housed patients during the cholera outbreak; don’t panic, Michael is going to be alright…
Mother had passed away there, he had never thought he would ever have to go back to this damn ward, but now his son was going there, his son, who was suddenly pale and thin; not Michael, not Michael, forgive me, merciful Father, forgive me my trespasses, or punish me and save my son; Loretta, I am so damn sorry.
Lionel Jones went to his own Toyota, parked in the compound, and let the tears come.
*
Later, during the little sleep he got, she came again, clasping his left wrist, ever so gently, as if saying it’s okay, it’s okay, please don’t cry, it’s okay, not your fault, please, it’s okay…
Then she mouthed, …must be strong…
“I’m trying…” he whispered.
No, your son…must be strong…
And she showed him her hands, clenching and unclenching them, over and over and over on nothing….
*
The nurse, sniffing as though she had a cold, gave him another injection. She helped him slip onto a gurney, then strapped him down. She sniffled, then smiled at him.
“I don’t want you to fall off,” she said, her voice slightly nasal because of the cold. “I carrying you to the ward.”
He wondered, vaguely, why they would have a nurse with a cold in the Emergency Ward. She began to push him towards the double-doors that led to the corridor. His parents, with the doctor, had their backs to them.
“I carrying him to the warrrd,” she said again in that nasal voice.
His father didn’t answer. His mother gave an indifferent “Okay,” but didn’t glance at them.
The nurse pushed him out of the ward, then made a right turn that took them down a strangely, winding corridor. It was poorly lit with ancient looking, fat round bulbs that reminded him of the house in Essequibo, where he had lived as a child. She paused again at another bend in the corridor. She slipped a sort of grey hood over her head—maybe for the cold, he thought—then stepped in front of the gurney and began to pull it.
“Taking you to the waaad,” she said again. He could almost swear that she was laughing. From his strapped-in position on the gurney, he strained to see the end of the corridor. It seemed to him that the Emergency Unit was larger than he recalled it to be. He was just thinking that it was kind of strange that they hadn’t passed anyone else, when he saw two women approaching. Not walking, but gliding along the floor. They were both dressed in long grey gowns with blue edgings. Both wore veils. He could not see their faces, but he sensed that they were looking at him.
He wondered if they were nuns from the nearby East Street convent, who visited the hospital to pray for the sick and the dying. At the same time, he seemed to hear the muffled tolling of a bell outside. Someone is dying, he thought. He hadn’t known that they tolled a bell when a patient died at the hospital.
Now the two women were close to them. The nurse paused in the corridor. The two veiled women looked down on him.
“I taking him to the waaaaad,” the nurse said, her voice seeming more thick and nasal.
The women said nothing, but shook with laughter behind their veils; the nurse, sniffling and sniggering, joining in the secret joke
The nurse sniffled again and began to pull the gurney. As they passed, the woman nearest the gurney genuflected and made a mocking sign of the cross.
“Bless this sinful child,” she said, reaching out and brushing his privates.
(And this has happened to me before, he thought)
They moved on down the corridor, and, just when he was thinking that it had no end, they were in a sprawling, empty compound. The nurse wheeled him over cobblestones to an L-shaped, two storey building with a clock in a tower; the hands showing that it was midnight. Suddenly the nurse stopped in the centre of the compound.
She stared at the old building. She sniffed, then bowed low.
He’d thought at first that the building was deserted. But now he saw her. At the top storey. Standing still. The white woman, with skin so pale that he could see her green, pulsating veins. Those red, animal eyes stared into his, and he could feel a scream rising in him.
The sniffing nurse began to drag him to an open door.
“Where you taking me?” His voice a squeak.
She said nothing.
“Where you taking me?” he squeaked again.
She stopped. He saw her shoulders stiffen. She turned to him, her voice so thick that the words were almost unintelligible.
“I SHED I TEKAAIN YOU TO THE WAAAAADDD!”
The hood had come askew. Her neck had somehow stretched so that her head was now inches away from his. He gave a childish squeal and tried to shrink back into the gurney.
That face!
That face!
That face!

(Taken from the Guyanese supernatural novel Kamarang by Michael Jordan. Book design and illustrations by Harold Bascom.)
Copies of the illustrated edition of Kamarang are on sale at Austin’s Book Store and on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.
The author can also be contacted for autographed copies on +592 645 2447 or by email: [email protected])

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