Lady with a Lantern

TW: death, some horror

* * *

The hospital was like the wild west. Diseases the bad guys taking people down. Doctors the sheriffs trying to make things right. Patients dying from lost shoot outs.

And a sense of lawlessness. The fact that no one seemed to be in charge. The fact that things happened here that shouldn't happen in civilised society.

People would be doing fine and then suddenly – flat line. The resuscitation team arrived and did their best but the patients would die. No one batted an eyelid.

It's where I met the lady with a lantern. In this wild hospital, on the cardiac ward. She was in the corner bed, hunched up reading a book, in the lantern light, its warm yellow illuminating her delicate face like a painting from a bygone age. Why she didn't use a Kindle or a mobile phone, I did not know.

She was 22-years-old. I knew because she was one of the patients on my consultant's list. But what the medical notes failed to describe was how her black hair fell over her shoulder or how her slender black fingers never let go of her lantern.

And when she needed to get some air, she'd push her drip stand in one hand, and carry her lantern in the other, her hospital nightie unflattering, glimpses of flesh flashing through.

I caught her watching me, during the ward round. The cardiac surgeon and registrar discussed matters of her heart. The surgery went well and they considered discharging her back home. I scribed. But my eyes kept catching hers. I wondered how I must have looked to her. A dishevelled ginger in scrubs.

The lady with a lantern died.

She collapsed one night on the way to the bathroom. I was the first to get to her. Her breath had stopped and her heart stopped beating. Her lips turned blue.

"Can I get some help here," I shouted.

I pressed my lips to hers. A moment of intimate desperation. I exhaled all my breath. Her chest rose and fell and I proceeded to perform chest compressions.

The crash team arrived, eventually. Some arrived out of breath and useless. More experienced clinicians appeared and took over.

There's no dignity in CPR. Her chest was bared, pads applied and shocks delivered. Her frame jerked from the current, but the trace would not come back to life.

The cardiac surgeon had a bright idea. He reopened her chest there and then, a scalpel blade reopening the surgical scar and retractors tugging apart each half of the chest bone. He reached in and massaged her heart with his hand.

He found the ruptured ventricle which had caused her to collapse. A life lost because a stitch hadn't held. He put a urinary catheter and inflated the balloon to plug the gap. But to no avail. It was a bloody mess.

"Time of death, 11 p.m.," someone said.

The crash team was useless. That's what I thought. Arriving late and trying crazy things. They weren't sheriffs, they were cowboys.

I pulled off my blood-stained latex gloves, slapped them in a bin, and leaned up against the wall feeling deflated. I was at a loss over her loss. I mourned never getting to know her. I mourned the cruel way the reaper had taken her.

I saw her lantern. It had fallen beneath a bed, away from her. Its light shone a dim blue. I took it and pushed past despondent staff and placed it under her hands.

* * *

I was on a night shift when I saw her again. It was her spirit, gliding languidly down the corridor. Her eyes were wide with terror and her chest wide open.

I screamed and ran from the dimly lit ward into the safety of the harsh fluorescent light of the passageway. I panted, wildly looking around me, trying to see if I'd been chased. But she was gone.

I called in sick the following night shift. I was petrified. I slept with the lights on but when there was a power cut and she did not appear my trembling disappeared. She was trapped at the hospital.

I returned to work the next night shift because of guilt. I felt guilty that my colleagues had to cover my work load on the wards. But down every dim corridor I was afraid to see her wraith, her ethereal lantern a dim red now.

I performed my duties as a house officer. Simple chores for a newly graduated doctor. I placed new intravenous lines in patients who needed them, and rewrote medical drug charts which had expired.

The wall clock read 11 p.m. I recalled suddenly that that was the time of her death and recoiled around and saw her coming right for me.

Terror pained her face. And I understood she was not trying to terrorise but she was terrified. I remembered who she was to me. A gentle soul and delicate. A being who I sensed could only be good and kind. I stepped towards her as she hurtled toward me and closed the wound on her chest with my hands.

Her face relaxed. Her beauty returned and she smiled. Her lantern glowed warm yellow afresh as she drifted and faded away.

* * *

I still saw her at night and sometimes in the day although no one else ever did. She seemed to be staying in our plane of existence. Something kept her back. Something kept her from leaving.

I realised she appeared at the moment people passed on. I couldn't see the other spirits, but I could tell she was helping their transition. Her hand outstretched as if guiding another soul and her lantern held in front of her leading the way.

She helped me when I died too.

It was unexpected. It often is. My cause of death was not an ailment, or overdose, or an act of God. Rather, it was the wild hospital striking again – I got shot. One of my colleagues, who'd had enough and gone postal, killing three that day.

The bullet pierced my heart and my consultant tried to repair the wound in the operating theatre. There's not a better place to be shot than in a trauma hospital, but it didn't matter. I died anyway.

As I stepped out of my body she appeared. The lady with a lantern. Smiling.

"I've been waiting for you," she said offering a hand.

I took her hand and we moved away.

"Look into the light."

As I held her hand we gazed into the lantern, the light becoming warmer and brighter. It became a brilliant shine and we became free with the light.