Intensive Scare

Intensive Scare-2

Of the other patients currently languishing in their beds there was Enid Bottletop, an elderly witch who was becoming rather forgetful, and who was in hospital more for the benefit of the townsfolk than anything else. She'd been brought in by Constable Gullett after he found her perched on a windowsill, purring, and asking for a saucer of milk. The seriousness of her condition was clearly evident. The poor thing was at the wrong house. She usually got her lactose at Mr. and Mrs. Doom's.

Then there was Ascension White, a newly turned golem who'd contracted a nasty dose of stone fungus, although seeing as how he was still on probation it wasn't strictly speaking his fault. The warlock who'd placed the enchantment in his mouth was to blame for that. He hadn't taken the necessary precautions re handwashing and the like, and so had passed the infection onto poor Ascension. He should've known better really. There're leaflets everywhere about safe hex.

And lastly there was Obidiah Dickens, a poor unfortunate soul of a poltergeist who'd gotten caught up in a drinking game at The Bolt and Jugular, and then gotten caught up in the ceiling fan of the same establishment when he sneezed and catapulted himself upwards at quite an impressive speed. He was currently resting in half a dozen plastic bags that were tied to the bed with string, whilst Dr Zoltan tried to figure out how to stitch mist together.

So, all in all, on balance, when all's said and done, and whatever the hell else people say when things aren't going too bad, it wasn't going too bad. They had their busy times of course, but that was usually around the holidays, or when Mrs. Ladle decided to try out a new cake recipe.

Nurse Parsnip was just about to tuck in an errant corner of freshly laundered bed sheet when a noise from the pharmacy at the end of the ward attracted her attention. It sounded like bottles clinking together, but it couldn't be that because she'd finished her medicine round over an hour ago and locked it up.

Forgetting the untidy bed cover for the moment, she walked quietly towards the dispensary, because it took her past the other resting patients.

The little room had windows, but they were frosted, but that didn't make a whole lot of difference because it was dark anyway. As she approached, she squinted in the way that all people do when trying to see something more clearly (which is just silly. I mean you wouldn't talk more quietly to make yourself heard, or slow down if you were in a hurry, would you?), but it didn't help.

Strangely, despite the continuing noise coming from within, she couldn't see any actual movement, but as already noted, the glass and the darkness would be a major hindrance to that.

She momentarily wondered if it was Dr Zoltan in there, engaged in some night-time experimentation or research. He sometimes liked to fiddle about with all the various potions and tinctures in an effort to come up with more effective treatments for the particular type of maladies that could befall the residents of Skullenia. Well, that's what he told Nurse Parsnip anyway. If the truth be known, the good doctor could barely remember how to make a pot of tea, so the chances of him inventing a cure for say, Ghoul Rash or Warty Troll Syndrome, were about as likely as UKIP employing a Polish MP with special responsibility for bringing in as many of his countrymen into Britain as was feasibly possible.

No, the reason that Dr Zoltan often pottered about the medicines was that he had a bit of a crush on the lovely Nurse Parsnip you see, and he would sometimes hide in the dispensary and peek through the keyhole at the female ghoul as she went about her nursely duties. And whilst I know that sounds a tad creepy, it was only because he was a little bit shy when it came to matters of the heart. In other words, when he tried to speak to a lady, he turned into a gibbering wreck who couldn't have got a coherent sentence out if his life depended on it. Not that anyone would've noticed. He was scatty at the best of times, a state of being that saw him once prescribe an aggressive course of hormone replacement therapy for Hector Lozenge to help him with his alcohol problem. It hadn't helped the old boy of course, but then how could it have done? What was he going to do with a pair of boobs and a worrying craving for chocolate? On the other hand, Mrs. Throb, the lady who'd received his addiction counteraction remedy got on brilliantly. She's a professional wrestler now and can roll up a frying pan with her bare hands.

Anyway, Zoltan had considered telling her about his feelings, but he was worried that she might find him a bit too old and set in his ways, and if she rejected him it may make their pleasant working relationship a bit tense.

Nurse Parsnip rejected the idea of the physician being in attendance though, because Zoltan had told her earlier in the day that he was going on a house call that evening. Derek Strudel had dropped one of his mum's smaller saucepans on his foot and broken twelve bones and the concrete floor that he'd been standing on. He needed some painkillers, a spot of physiotherapy, and a hefty dose of `stop making such a fuss you great big girlie man'.

She reached into her pocket, took out her keys, and sorted through them for the right one. It took a couple of minutes because she had them all, from the smallest cupboard in the basement, to the vast atrium on the third floor where the patients went for a bit of R and R after treatment (reeling and rocking if it was Hector Lozenge, ranting and raving if it was a witch, and wandering about like a wally if it was Flug because he couldn't spell).

With the correct key in hand, Nurse Parsnip approached the door. As she put the key towards the lock the door banged noisily in its frame. She let out a yelp of surprise and jumped backwards a couple of feet.

“Alright,” she said, her voice sounding far more confident that she actually felt. “That's enough messing about for one night. I'm coming in there right now and if you haven't got a decent excuse for being in attendance there's going to be trouble.”

Without any further hesitation she slammed the key into the lock, threw open the door, and flicked the light on.

Nurse Parsnip screamed.

* * *

Noggin was on the prowl. As a vampire cat he absolutely loved being out and about, but the fact that it was an integral facet of his nature wasn't the only reason for his unalloyed pleasure. What made it especially thrilling was that he could never tell what was going to happen. He literally had no idea where he'd end up, who he'd bump into, or what juicy titbits might be found lurking in the dark recesses of the night. And bearing in mind the size of his territory that could be anything from a wandering Blue Badger to a fully grown troll. And what with Noggin being, well, Noggin, he had no compunction whatsoever in taking down whatever poor, unfortunate creature it was that was unlucky enough to cross his path, and taking it home to his `owner', Mandrake. Not that Mandrake could claim to be the `owner' of the psychotic feline of course because like most cats, Noggin was very much his own person, so to speak, and would hang around somewhere as long as it was warm and cosy and he got a tickle under the chin every now and again.

By nature, Noggin was a happy go lucky sort of a cat, in that he was happy to rend into bloody ribbons anything covered in flesh and you were lucky if it wasn't you. He had a murderous streak to rival Eric `The Eviscerator' Edwards, last year's winner of the Serial Killer World Championships, and a lust for blood that would make a Central African dictator go running for the sick bucket.

A consummate predator he had many, and various hunting methods at his disposal, ones that were always guaranteed to net him his prey. They included, but were not limited to, the marauding, `all out frontal assault involving lots of noise, slashing claws, and razor sharp fangs,' the patient, `stalk through the grass, watch for a bit, then pounce when you're not looking,' and, of course, the beautifully stealthy and infinitely more terrifying, `hanging about on a bird table pretending to be a peanut'.

He came and went as he pleased, not that anyone or anything would argue with him. Why, just the other night he'd had a run in with a large Forest Hound who'd had the temerity to use Noggin's favourite scratching post as a makeshift toilet. On discovering this most foul of desecrations, Noggin had turned into a fifty-six-pound ball of fur and claws that had trounced the much bigger animal in three seconds flat. And then, to add insult to considerable injury, Noggin had used the battered canine as a combined scratch post and cat litter, providing proof that cats have a finely honed sense of irony.

Tonight, though, he had eschewed the dank perils of the forest and was hunting in and around the town square, because at this particular time of night there was a very good chance that he could snag some staggering drunk, rough him up a bit, and deposit him on Mandrake's front step.

Many was the morning that Mandrake would open his front door to get the milk only to find a semi-conscious and heavily lacerated creature staring up at him in bewilderment with Noggin sat proudly on their chest. On one occasion he'd found Ten Foot Teddy out there, face down in a pot plant with an ear and most of his trousers missing. Quite how Noggin had managed to overpower the enormous golem and get him to the house was a mystery, and it would remain as such because no one was daft enough to investigate the matter. Not without arranging their funeral and making sure that their affairs were in order anyway.

After having a sniff at the fountain (which occupied him for about twenty minutes what with blood having the same effect on a vampire cat that catnip has on an ordinary moggy), making sure that his territory was still adequately marked (he didn't have to travel too far to do this. He could put a fire out at three hundred yards), and depositing what, on first appearance, seemed to be a five foot length of rope on the pavement outside Mrs. Strudel's café (a mistake that her son, Derek would make later that day when he tried to pick it up), Noggin swaggered over to The Bolt and Jugular. It was almost time for the pub to close and the shouts from the landlord and the complaints from the patrons were signal enough to draw Noggin in.

As he neared Skullenia's only pub, his senses were overawed by the various aromas emanating from within. It was a subtle combination of bad food, pungent and highly corrosive alcohol, and body odours that wouldn't have been out of place in a morgue where the cooling system had broken down. (Or a teenage boy's bedroom for that matter because that's just as bad. That's if you can get in it of course. Obviously you'd have to negotiate a mountain of clothes, some items of which may actually be clean, some questionable and, quite frankly, revolting substances that could only be identified in a laboratory, and a well-thumbed collection of exotic periodicals containing ladies in minimal clothing, tradesmen of one sort or another, and some very informative articles that are about as likely to be read as Philo the Dwarf's guide to the Slam-dunk).