The Psyching: A Short Thriller

The Psyching: A Short
Story

© 2015 by Freida McFadden.
All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. No
part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means whatsoever without express written permission from the
author

This book is a work of
fiction. The names, characters, incidents and places are the
products of the authors’ imagination, and are not to be construed
as real. None of the characters in the book is based on an actual
person. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely
coincidental and unintentional.

“
The
Psyching”
was first published
in
11 out of 10
,
edited by Freida McFadden.

Tonight I am the medical student
on call on our locked psychiatry unit at Overlook Hospital. That
would be bad enough in itself. I mean, being locked up for 24 hours
with a bunch of crazy people is not my idea of a good
time.

But there’s something much worse going on
tonight.

I’m not a superstitious person. I don’t
believe in black cats, broken mirrors, or rabbits’ feet. Well, I
believe all those things exist, obviously, but not that they’re
associated with any sort of luck in one way or another. But it’s
hard not to get a little bit creeped out about tonight.

Exactly ten years ago tonight, two
medical students were on call with a psychiatry resident, just like
tonight. The unit was locked, just like tonight. And in the
morning, the janitor came in to clean the resident room and it was
discovered that the resident had hacked to death the two medical
students, then killed himself.

Here’s to hoping history doesn’t repeat
itself.

3:30 p.m.:

“
Are you excited about
tonight?”

It’s irritating how amused our resident Jack
seems about the entire thing. He has literally been talking about
tonight nonstop for a week. I think he’s looking forward to
it.

“
Sure,” I mumble, mostly because I
don’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that I’m creeped
out.

“
You know,” Jack says, “enthusiasm
makes up about half your grade…”

I just glare at him.

“
Don’t worry,” Jack says. “I won’t
let anybody murder you.”

I fold my arms
across my chest. “You know that 10 years ago, the
resident
was the one who
killed everyone.”

“
Right,” Jack
says. “You didn’t let me finish. I was going to say that I won’t
let anyone murder you
besides
me
.”

He’s hilarious. Absolutely
hilarious.

“
Who are you on call with
tonight?”

“
Danielle Gerard.”

“
You and Danni,
huh?” Jack smirks to himself. “The two of you are going to be
together
all night long
? That is
adorable
.”

He acts like we’re going to spend the night
making out or something.

“
Don’t worry,” he says again. “I
would definitely kill Danni before I would kill you.”

I don’t doubt that’s true. I’m pretty sure
almost every resident has wanted to kill Danni Gerard at some
point.

Jack chuckles to himself. “Come
on, Wendy, you’re not seriously worried, are you? I mean, that
resident 10 years ago had a lot of serious issues. I’m totally
normal though.”

I raise my eyebrows at him. “Are
you?”

Jack Lawson has been my resident for two whole
weeks. I don’t know if I would describe him as normal, but I
probably wouldn’t characterize him as homicidal either. Or even
psychopathic. I would mostly say that he needs a haircut and a
shave—his brown hair is just a little bit too shaggy to be
professional, and he sports a 5 o’clock shadow every day until the
midafternoon, when it becomes a full-on beard. His green scrubs are
really wrinkled, even for scrubs.

“
Totally normal,” he assures
me.

“
Don’t people go into psychiatry
as a way of dealing with their own psychiatric issues?”

“
Some people,” he admits. “But a
lot of us do it because it’s an easy residency and we’re totally
lazy.”

“
And you’re lazy?”

“
God, yes,” he says. “Have you
learned nothing in the last two weeks?”

I guess he’s right. He does seem incredibly
lazy.

“
Anyway,” Jack says, “I’m hoping
this is going to be a quiet call. Be warned that if things get
really quiet I may disappear to go work on my novel.”

I stare at him. “You’re writing a
novel?”

Jack nods. “When it becomes a bestseller, I
can quit medicine and live off the profits.”

“
Good luck with that.”

4:15 p.m.:

“
I’m scared, Wendy.”

Danni is staring at me with her big brown doe
eyes. I start feeling irritated. There are 45 minutes before our
call officially begins, and I’m already panicked enough without
having to comfort Danni.

“
There’s nothing to be scared of,”
I tell her. I avert my eyes because Danni’s short white coat is so
clean and white that it’s giving me a headache. “Jack isn’t going
to murder us.”

“
He might,” she says.

“
He won’t.”

“
I never told you this before,”
she says, “but I’m actually really psychic about
things.”

Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.

She reaches out and grabs my arm with her
skinny little fingers. “I just have this feeling that something
terrible is going to happen tonight. Just like 10 years
ago.”

Danni blinks her big eyes at me again. She’d
actually be really pretty if she weren’t so annoying. Annoyingness
always overshadows prettiness.

“
Nothing is going to happen,” I
say firmly.

“
Dr. Sadler is worried too,” Danni
tells me.

I can’t help but frown. Dr. Sadler
is our attending physician, a middle-aged man with a big doughy
face and receding hairline who rarely cracks a smile, much less a
joke during our morning rounds. He seems like an eminently
practical person, not someone likely to believe in dumb
superstition.

“
He told you he’s
worried?”

Danni nods solemnly. “Yes. He did.” She lowers
her voice a few notches. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but
Dr. Sadler and I actually share a psychic connection.”

“
You’re kidding.”

“
It’s true,” Danni assures me. “He
says he doesn’t have this type of connection with anyone else, even
his wife.”

I cringe. “Oh, Danni…”

“
Anyway,” she goes on, “he said
that if we feel in danger at any point, even a little bit, I should
text him and he’ll come right over to save us.”

“
Very reassuring.”

Danni beams at me. “I thought so
too.”

It just occurred to me: Dr. Sadler must’ve
given Danni his cell phone number. I can’t even begin to deal with
that one.

5:00 p.m.:

Lockdown.

The psychiatric ward at our hospital is
arranged in a circle. If you start at the entrance and keep
walking, you will eventually end up where you started. (This comes
in handy if you are a psychiatric patient who wants to go around in
circles the entire day.) There’s only one entrance/exit to the
ward, and it is now locked. With a key. A key that only Jack and
one nurse have in their possession.

“
Okay, guys,” Jack says to me and
Danni. “Why don’t you two hang out at the nurses station? You can
read if you’d like. Just give me a page if you need me.”

“
Can we call loved ones to tell
them goodbye?” Danni asks him.

“
Absolutely!”

Jack starts to walk away chuckling, but then
he stops midway down the hall. He turns around, looking
thoughtful.

“
By the way,” he said, “whatever
you do, don’t go in Room 237.”

I stare at him. “What’s in Room
237?”

“
Don’t worry yourself about that,”
he says quickly. “Just don’t go in there. Okay?”

“
Okay!” Danni says
cheerfully.

As Jack walks down the hallway, I turn to
Danni and whisper, “Don’t you think that was weird?”

“
What was weird?”

“
That there’s some room that we’re
not supposed to go inside. Don’t you think that seems
suspicious?”

Danni’s eyebrows shoot up. “Do you want me to
text Dr. Sadler?”

I see her reaching for her phone, so I quickly
say, “No.” God, no.

A patient that I know only as “Johnny”
stumbles down the hall at that moment. Johnny is a big guy, with a
moon face and a gray sweat suit, and drool perpetually in the
corner of his mouth. He walks towards us, his gray socks padding
against the floor. He stops right in front of us.

“
Lick,” Johnny says to us, as
spittle flies out of his mouth.

He watches us for a moment, waiting for our
response, which is obviously complete horror and disgust. Then he
turns away from us and continues on his circle around the
unit.

This is going to be a long night.

6:30 p.m.:

“
This isn’t good.”

My stomach flips slightly as I hear a nurse
named Sally mumbling into a phone. While those are definitely the
words you least want to hear during, say, a brain surgery in which
you’re the patient, you also don’t want to hear it when you’re
locked on a psychiatric ward for the night with a bunch of crazy
people.

“
What’s wrong?” I ask
her.

Sally gives me the same look she
would give a fly that was buzzing in her face. It’s a special look
that seems to be reserved for us medical students. The lines on
Sally’s narrow face tell me she’s been a nurse long enough to have
perfected that look. “The phone lines seem to be down.”

I stare at her. “That’s not good.”

“
No kidding.”

“
We’re on a locked unit,” I say
nervously. “Isn’t it dangerous if the phone lines are
down?”

Sally looks at me for a minute, then her face
breaks out in a smile. “Oh right, you’re worried about being
murdered tonight!”

And then she wanders away, chuckling to
herself.

7:45 p.m.:

The psychiatric unit has one room that is
reserved for the residents to use, basically as a hang out. There’s
a couch and a computer, and a few chairs, but not much else.
Nothing fun, like a foosball table. I head over to the resident
room, and find that the door is shut, but not locked. I open the
door and discover Jack sitting inside, working at the computer. He
seems to have Microsoft Word open, but quickly minimizes the window
when I come into the room.

“
Mrs. Klein has a headache,” I
tell him.

“
Mrs.
Klein
is
a
headache,” he says. Which is mean but also kind of
true.

“
What are you working on?” I ask,
nodding at the computer.

“
My novel.”

He was actually serious about that. He really
is writing a novel. “Can I read it?”

“
Nobody reads it until it’s
finished,” he says rather solemnly.

I shrug. “Okay.”

“
By the way,” he says, “you didn’t
go into Room 237, did you?”

I get butterflies in my stomach at the way
Jack is studying my face. Why does he keep asking me about the
room? I almost forgot about it until he brought it up. Now it’s
going to drive me crazy again. “No.”