Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: EERIE (07/28/16)
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TITLE: Our Hospital, Our Church, Our Home. | Previous Challenge Entry
By Danielle King
08/04/16 -
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Razed to the ground, it was. Annihilated by mindless thugs seeking entertainment. Lizzie’s heart crushed as she scanned the atrocity laid out before her. The stench of scorched earth hung in the ether, still; weeks after the blaze had eradicated all evidence of a building ever being there.
But, The Hospital Church of St Faith was no ordinary structure.
Lizzie slipped off her coat and spread it over a smoke-blackened boulder before slumping down to take stock of the desecration.
The old psychiatric hospital itself had become a block of luxury apartments. And the abandoned church, dated like the hospital from the 1860’s, had stood massive and alone in a corner of extensive grounds.
Stunned and emotional, Lizzie began to rock. Rhythmically she rocked; back and forth, hugging her knees and staring at her toes. So preoccupied was she, that the fading daylight went unnoticed as recollections of life on the ‘inside’ began to filter through.
Home… one of those huge institutions that could once be found dotted around the country, the old lunatic asylums. Offensive words nowadays, but they could be identified from miles away by the tall boiler-house chimney towering above trees, houses and workshops; survivors of a time when the mentally disturbed were kept far away from the lives of ‘normal’ people.
Lizzie felt a keen chill and reached for her cardigan. The moon cast a surreal hue over the residues of the gutted church. A small sound caught her attention. She listened carefully… whispers. Many whispers; the softest of whispers, carried on the cool breeze; teasing, mesmerising, enticing as they progressively infiltrated the stillness.
Across the grounds flickering lights in the apartment block caught Lizzie’s eye. It wasn’t right, it was too late. In her forty years of life on the ‘inside,’ a strict rule of lights out at eight was enforced. Now, like others, she was living ‘in the community’ in social housing. A desperately lonely place to be.
Memories, distinct and lucid began to swamp Lizzie’s head. A startling ache for the past overwhelmed. Regardless of loss of liberty, autonomy, privacy, the need to belong consumed her.
Dusk gathered quickly bringing with it powerful memories. Squinting through the dimness her eyes alighted upon what seemed to be shadowy silhouettes, being escorted along the old hospital path towards the burned out St Faith’s.
The whispers grew increasingly louder; now vibrant, spirited and clearly audible, filling Lizzie’s soul with a warm, cosy glow.
Fearlessly she welcomed the apparition. There was no-one around to administer medication; no-one to tell her the voices weren’t real, or the silhouettes but phantoms, the product of a sick mind.
Nonetheless, she was back in her old, staid and stolid environment; back with familiar somebodies, and society’s nobodies. Ex-inmates of the old workhouse; young mums of illegitimate babies; those who became too ill, too long ago to be sent home, and those with no home to go to.
The ethereal figures came to a halt and congregated in the church vestibule. It was springtime and rooks were nesting in the tall elms, and there was peace.
The waiting Chaplain warmly welcomed his disparate little flock before ushering them inside. And turning back, smiled, and with an open armed gesture bade Lizzie to join them.
Glancing beyond the opened door, Lizzie caught a glimpse of the magnificent West Window presenting a view of the hospital itself, and surrounded by representative figures – a nurse, doctor, engineer, a group of patients, and in cassock and surplice and clutching the Book of Common Prayer, the Chaplain. All preserved for eternity in stained glass.
This was their church; their hospital family church, where even the most deranged, disruptive and disquieted were never turned away.
Beneath the window, the small congregation were gathered by the altar to share Holy Communion; an island of bright light in a vast shadowy church.
Lizzie turned, and stared long and hard into the black night. Then facing back, reached out to grasp the Chaplain’s waiting hand.
The following weekend a short column in the local newspaper announced that the body of an elderly woman had been discovered in the grounds of the former Southern Meads Hospital. Foul play not suspected. Identity as yet unknown.
*The story is based on a factual hospital that was finally demolished in 1995. The church burned down in 2012 and has now become another block of luxury apartments. Over the road in a shabby social housing estate, ex-patients can be seen aimlessly trailing the streets.
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Many of the lower level shops are in the previous 'cells' where they kept the unfortunate locked behind bars that have now been removed from the window walls.
I can't imagine living within that space where the mentally ill were many times tortured.
All that to say-you captured the essence of the topic particularly well for me this week.
Congrats on your EC placing.