Originally published in Kings River Life magazine, here's a short little spooky Halloween story for your shivery enjoyment! Happy Trails from Nameless, Texas!
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One night while laying in a cold, dark hospital room I spied the Angel of Death or was it the Grim Reaper? wisping down the hallway and into the room across the way, the inhabitant a white haired grandmother who had gone in for a routine procedure.
Never mind that I was stoned out of my mind on morphine, prescribed by the doctor, that wonderful stuff that took the edge off the pain after my surgery and never mind that it was 3 a.m. and there wasn’t another soul except for her and I (alive, anyway) on that whole corridor when I saw that horrible visage of death with the eyeless face in the black and drapey robe with great dark cowl or dare I call it a shroud?
Nurses pooh-poohed my imagination and turned up the volume on the meds and told me to stay in bed where I belonged even though the doctor told me to get up and walk they said I didn’t have any business wandering around the hallways in the dead of night. No telling what might happen, they warned.
They were too busy taking their smokes outside the door in the cold night air and didn’t want to be bothered with someone who wouldn’t behave, someone who saw dark figures lurking about the halls at night and insisting that at 3 a.m. someone had been there.
But I found out, almost by accident, after I noticed that her room was empty and when I asked after her health that the elderly woman who had been across the hall from me died at precisely 3 a.m. on that very night and how could I have known that? And it occurred to me then that the dark figure got his signals crossed, and went into her room instead of mine. THE END
