30 Jul The Night Nurses of Stonefeld

I’m not really sure how to start this. I’ve never told the whole thing before. I don’t know if what happened to me qualifies as scary in the way most folks think, but it’s true. Every damn bit of it. And it was scary. In the way things are when you’re helpless and no one believes you, and you’re not even sure your own brain is working right.

I’ll try to be clear. But I’ll warn you—some of this might sound… fuzzy. I had a stroke, and when this all happened, I wasn’t firing on all cylinders. Still aren’t, if I’m honest. But I’m better now. Stronger. I live on my own again. I can cook, drive, walk with a cane, even use a smartphone on good days. They said I’d never recover that much. I like proving people wrong.

But back then—two years ago—I was at my lowest.

I’d collapsed in my garage, somewhere between the workbench and the freezer. I was unconscious for who knows how long before the neighbor heard the radio still going and came over. When I woke up, I was in the hospital with a feeding tube and a nurse explaining where I was, like I was five years old. I couldn’t move my right side. Couldn’t speak more than a couple words at a time. Couldn’t remember names—not even my daughter’s.

They told me I’d had a major ischemic stroke, and that it would take months to recover—if I recovered at all. And that’s when they decided I’d be better off in a “care environment.” Someplace quiet and peaceful, where someone could watch me around the clock.

They sent me to Stonefeld Wellness Center and Assisted Living, just outside of Greenswood, Indiana. Nice little brick place with flower beds and bird feeders out front. All very pretty. They had a piano in the main room and jigsaw puzzles laid out on the tables like it was a church basement. It was summer when I arrived. Warm. Bees buzzing in the bushes.

The staff were… cordial. Smiling all the time. Always smelled faintly of antiseptic and mint gum.

They wheeled me into my new room and told me I’d be there for a while, maybe permanently depending on my progress. I nodded—I think I nodded—but inside, I was terrified. Everything felt far away. I was trapped in my body. My mind was like a foggy window—things would pass by, and I’d only catch fragments. I remember the nurse telling me her name, but it slipped away before I could repeat it.

The days passed. Some were better than others. My fingers twitched. I learned to hold a fork again. Speech therapy helped, though I still garbled certain words. My mind came back slower than my limbs, and not always in the right order.

But even then—even in that hazy state—I started noticing things. Strange things.

For one, nights were… wrong. I’d go to sleep, or I thought I would, but then wake up hours later, sweaty and confused. I chalked it up to medication or bad dreams. But then I started hearing sounds. Faint music, almost like a lullaby, old and out of tune. I’d lie there with my eyes open, unable to move more than a finger or two, listening to it drift through the air vents or under the door.

At first, I thought I was dreaming. But it kept happening.

Then I saw Mabel.

She was in the room two doors down. Eighty-something. A tiny bird-boned woman with pale eyes and long gray hair braided like a schoolgirl’s. The nurses said she used to be a choir director before dementia set in. She barely spoke, but when she did, it was always the same thing:

“They come out when the moon’s up. The dancers. They wear your face. They wear you.”

She said it to anyone who’d listen, over and over. I didn’t understand what she meant, not until later.

The staff always hushed her. Told her “shh, now,” and patted her hand like she was a toddler. Sometimes they’d wheel her away for “extra care.” She’d come back quiet for a few days after that. But she’d always start up again when the full moon got close.

I remember one of the male aides—Josh, I think—whispering to another:

“She’s always worse during the cycle. Full moon, no fail. Creeps me the hell out.”

One night I managed to sit up in bed and peek through the curtain. The moon was big and yellow outside, just above the tree line, and I thought I saw shadows crossing the courtyard. Not people exactly—more like outlines, and they were moving strangely.

I told the nurse the next morning, and she smiled widely and said, “You’re still adjusting to the medications, George. That’s totally normal.”

They always said that. “Normal.”

Two days later, Mabel was gone. They said she passed quietly in her sleep. “Natural causes.”

They packed her things in a cardboard box by noon. Her nameplate was off the door by dinnertime.

I remember sitting in my wheelchair by the window, staring out at the garden, thinking: It doesn’t feel right. People disappear too fast here.

But I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure I could trust my brain. Not after the stroke. Maybe it was just my imagination. Maybe I dreamed the music. Maybe Mabel had simply passed on, like we all do eventually.

Still… I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was next.

And I’d only just started to remember my daughter’s name.

* * * * * *

After Mabel died, things changed for me, not quickly, but noticeably. The first difference was the way people looked at me—or didn’t.

The aides who used to joke with me or ask about my grandkids started keeping things brief. The nurses were still friendly, but something in their eyes had cooled. Professional distance, I guessed. Maybe they thought I was going the same way Mabel had. Maybe they were right.

My speech therapist, Miss Ramsey, still treated me like a person. She was a young woman, maybe early thirties. Wore chunky necklaces and always carried a big water bottle with fruit floating in it. I liked her. She listened, even when I didn’t make sense.

Once, during a session, I tried to explain what I’d seen. I couldn’t find the words for it—the dancers, the way Mabel had talked about them—but I said something like, “They come… take people… courtyard, night…”

She paused, lowered her pen, and smiled softly. “Sometimes trauma and confusion can create patterns in the brain that aren’t really there. The mind wants to make sense of things, especially when things feel out of our control.”

I nodded. What else could I do?

But deep down, I didn’t believe it was just my mind trying to make sense of things.

I started watching the courtyard at night. Not every night—some nights I was too exhausted, or they dosed me more heavily than usual. But when I could, I stayed awake, propped up in bed, with a pillow behind my shoulder, listening.

The music came more often. Sometimes it was faint, like wind chimes. Other times it was low and droning, like a cello played underwater. There were never any lyrics, just sounds. Ancient, maybe. It didn’t seem like something a human composed. And, yes, I understand how that sounds.

I’d catch glimpses of motion out there. White shapes. Too slender to be wheelchairs, too tall to be the orderlies. They moved in arcs, sometimes in circles, like they were practicing something.

Twice, I saw someone being led outside. They were always in a chair, and always unresponsive. Once it was a man named Donnie—I recognized his flannel robe, the sleeves always bunched up at the elbows. He’d had a massive stroke, worse than mine, and hadn’t spoken in weeks.

They wheeled him out the fire door around 2:00 a.m. I checked the clock. I remember because it had been chiming every hour lately, like something in the gears was misaligned. That night it didn’t chime at all.

I watched the courtyard. I watched as the nurses—if you could call them that—circled Donnie’s chair. There were four or five of them, maybe more. I couldn’t tell. They weren’t wearing scrubs, or at least not normal ones. The fabric looked too loose, like old hospital gowns. Their hats were wrong, too—tall and pointed, like paper nurse caps from the 1950s.

They moved too smoothly. There was no stiffness, no clumsy shifting of weight. They resembled puppets on strings. But there were no strings.

One of them bent toward Donnie and held something to his chest. I thought it was a scalpel, the way jt shimmered. But there was no reflection, just black—like a hole, or a piece of the night sharpened into a blade. Again, I know that sounds crazy. If there was any better way to describe it, I swear I would.

I watched them cut.

There was no blood, just a curling shadow, like smoke, that rose from Donnie’s body and clung to the air around them. One of the nurses took it—peeled it, I swear to God—and stepped into it like you’d pull on a raincoat.

Donnie didn’t scream. He didn’t move at all.

Then they danced.

They weren’t waltzing or even swaying in the traditional sense. It wasn’t any dance I could name. Their bodies twisted, joints bending in ways that made my stomach lurch, and the one wearing Donnie—she bent the deepest. It was as if the skin still remembered him. Or maybe it was still partly him.

I passed out. I think.

When I woke up, it was mornin, and bright sun was shining through the window. There were birds at the feeder.

And Donnie was gone.

Heart failure, they said. Peaceful. Painless.

His room was cleaned out by lunchtime. His bed was already made for the next poor bastard by dinner.

I didn’t ask questions this time. What was the point?

I started pretending to be worse off than I was, slower to respond, harder to reach. That way, if they were watching me—and by then I was sure they were—I’d seem like an easy mark. But inside, I was sharpening. I stopped taking the pills they gave me for sleep. I hid them under my tongue and spit them into tissues when no one was looking.

It helped. My mind got clearer. It wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it was definitely sharper than before.

And I began noticing even more. The orderlies had tics. There was one man, tall, thin, and pale, with close-cropped hair. He never blinked, not once. I tested it, timing him while pretending to nap in my chair.

There was a nurse who whistled the same three-note tune every time she entered a room, except the notes weren’t from any song I knew. They sounded more like signals.

I overheard one aide mention that they’d lost three residents in a single week.

“Must be some kind of record,” he said.

“They’re thinning the list before inspections,” the other replied.

I don’t think that’s what he meant, not really, but I knew what it sounded like.

I started keeping track of the moon.

Three days before the next full one, they started giving me different pills. The labels looked the same, but the capsules were a shade darker. I crushed one in a napkin and smelled it. It was bitter and sharp, not the usual chalky stuff. They wanted me pliable.

I had three days to figure something out, but my body still didn’t listen the way it used to. I couldn’t run, or lift anything heavier than a dinner plate. My speech was still unpredictable. Sometimes I forgot words mid-sentence. Sometimes I forgot why I walked into a room. But I remembered Mabel and Donnie, and I knew, without a doubt, that whatever lived behind those nurses’ eyes wanted me next.

* * * * * *

I waited. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for exactly, but I knew it would happen under the full moon.

When the day finally came, I felt it before I even saw the sky. The whole building was quieter than usual. There was no laughter from the lunchroom. No hallway bingo announcements. Even the overhead speakers that piped in instrumental music—what the staff called “wellness ambiance”—had gone silent.

Around dinner, one of the nurses brought my tray. Chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans. She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes.

“Eat up now, George. It’s a big day tomorrow. You’ve made a lot of progress.”

It didn’t feel like a compliment.

I didn’t eat. I hid the food under the napkin and slid the tray aside. I couldn’t risk being drugged that night, not with what I knew was coming.

I stayed in bed, pretending to doze, but every part of me was listening. I watched the clock on the wall. Tick. Tick. The second hand wobbled just slightly, always seemingly off by a fraction of a second, like it ran on a different rhythm than the rest of the world.

At 2:04 a.m., I heard the fire door click. It was quiet, like the lock gave way on its own. There was no alarm, and no footsteps.

I shifted slowly, pushing my legs toward the edge of the bed, wincing as pain spiked up my right hip. I’d regained partial use of it, but not much. Still, it was enough to get upright if I braced myself.

I wheeled myself to the window. I didn’t turn on the light.

The moon hung high and white above the courtyard in a cloudless sky. The ivy-covered walls glowed faintly under it. Everything looked bleached out, like an old photograph left in the sun.

And then they came.

There were five of them this time, maybe six. It was hard to count. They moved together in perfect step, like a flock of birds shifting direction in the sky. I recognized two of them immediately. One was the blinking nurse—because she still didn’t. The other was that tall orderly with the buzz cut. His spine was too straight, his arms too loose, like he was filled with water instead of bone.

They brought someone with them. It took me a second to recognize her. Cora Haskins. Room 114.

She was a retired schoolteacher, a sweet woman. Sharp, even in her eighties. She’d given me half of her crossword puzzle books a month earlier, saying I needed them more than she did. She used to hum old war songs while we ate lunch. My daughter reminded her of her own.

Now she was slumped in a wheelchair, motionless, mouth slightly open.

They’d dressed her in a nightgown I hadn’t seen before. It was pale blue, patterned with little white flowers. Something about it made my stomach clench.

The nurses circled her like wolves. One of them, short and broad-shouldered, stepped forward and raised that same dark tool I’d seen used on Donnie. It shimmered, not with light, but with absence, like the blade was carved from a deeper part of the night. It didn’t reflect—it swallowed.

He brought it to Cora’s chest and made a long, slow cut. There was no blood or tearing, just this black steam curling out of the wound, too thick and heavy to be smoke. It pulsed as it rose, dancing upward like it wanted to be free, but was being caught and funneled.

One of the others reached into it and into Cora, carefully, reverently.

And then they began to peel.

Her skin came off like a sheet, seamlessly, without struggle. There was no screaming.

Whatever boundary there is between a person and what holds them together, they reached right past it and unfastened her.

The thing that took her stepped into the skin. I watched it shrug into her like a coat. Her face molded over the nurse’s. Her arms dangled at her sides like sleeves being filled. Then it lifted its head and smiled.

I can’t explain how wrong it looked, not just the shape of the smile—though that was bad enough, like someone stretching wax too thin—but the recognition. It was as if Cora were still in there, watching, as if her face was reacting separately from the thing wearing her.

Then came the dancing.

They moved in loops and spirals. I couldn’t hear any music this time, but they didn’t seem to need it. Their rhythm was internal. Their feet barely touched the ground, but even so the courtyard plants bent away from them as they passed, as if repulsed.

The skin-wearer twirled at the center. Cora’s flesh didn’t flap or sag; it clung, as if it wanted to be part of the motion. Like it had given up.

My head started to swim. I felt pressure behind my eyes, as if my brain was swelling against my skull.

That’s when one of the nurses stopped and looked straight at my window, tilting her head. Where her eyes should have been, there was nothing but darkness behind the white cap and skin. But I knew she’d seen.

I backed away, too fast. My foot clipped the oxygen tank next to the bed and sent it clanging against the wall.

I froze.

There was no movement from outside.

A minute passed, then two.

And then they were gone, in an instant.

I sat in my wheelchair until dawn, staring at the space where Cora had been. My hands trembled so badly I couldn’t hold my water cup.

When the nurse came in that morning, she gave me a funny look.

“Didn’t sleep?” she asked.

“Couldn’t,” I croaked.

“Well,” she said, fluffing my pillow, “today’s going to be a restful one. We’re down a resident. Poor Mrs. Haskins passed in her sleep last night.”

She said it as if she were reporting the weather.

I didn’t respond. I just nodded and let her move around me. I didn’t have the words yet—not the right ones. They hadn’t come back to me.

But what I did have was certainty. They were real. They moved under moonlight. They wore us.

This was really happening.

* * * * * *

After Cora, everything shifted. Not out in the open or all at once, but the change was undeniable.

I stopped being treated like someone recovering and started being treated like someone declining. It began with subtle things. Less conversation during meals. Fewer updates from staff. They spoke to me with that same tone you use with a pet that’s about to be put down—kind, distant, already grieving.

They knew. Perhaps not all of them, but some certainly did.

I began to feel watched, not just in passing, but constantly, as if someone was monitoring my routine, waiting for me to hit a specific point. The point where I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed, perhaps, or maybe the point where I wouldn’t fight back if they peeled me open like Cora.

I’d stopped taking the sleeping pills altogether by then. I flushed them, determined to keep my wits sharp. But the nurses noticed.

“Still not sleeping well, George?”

“You know how it is,” I said. “Old man bladder.”

That earned a chuckle, but the way she looked at me lingered too long.

They began offering alternatives. A new pill. An herbal tea. A compression wrap infused with lavender oil. All of it was supposed to relax the body. But I didn’t want my body relaxed. I wanted it ready.

The worst part was knowing I couldn’t do anything—not really. Not in the shape I was in. My body still betrayed me daily. My right leg dragged if I walked more than a few feet. My arm trembled if I held a spoon too long. And my speech, though better, still jammed up when I got nervous. That made things harder. It was harder to argue, harder to sound sane.

I tried to tell the chaplain. We had a visiting priest who came in every Friday—Father Halvorsen. Big guy with a sunburned nose and a kind face. He always made time for the residents. He played dominoes with Mabel once, back when she was still talking.

I asked for a private meeting in the chapel. He wheeled me down there himself.

The room was small. There were a few pews, a stained-glass window of Saint Michael with a sword drawn, and a little altar with a wooden cross. It smelled like old hymnals and lemon oil.

I told him everything. It didn’t come out cleanly. I stammered and forgot names, and my voice cracked, but I told him what I saw in the courtyard. About Donnie. About Cora. About the thing that danced in their skin.

He didn’t interrupt. He just listened.

When I finished, he nodded slowly and said, “You’ve been through a great deal, George. Sometimes trauma leaves impressions. I’ve counseled men who saw things in war—things that followed them home, in dreams or memory. But sometimes they weren’t just dreams. Sometimes… they were warnings.”

That gave me pause.

“Do you believe me?” I asked.

He didn’t answer right away.

“I believe something is happening here,” he said, “and I’ll pray for both of us.”

He squeezed my shoulder and walked me back.

I never saw him again.

The staff said he died in his sleep that night, of heart failure. It was peaceful, they told me. Painless. Just like Donnie. Just like Cora.

The following Sunday, someone else led services—a younger priest who didn’t make eye contact.

That’s when I stopped talking. Not because I was scared of sounding crazy, but because I was sure it wouldn’t matter. The people who listened either vanished or started looking at me like I was a problem to be managed. And the ones who smiled too widely? I started to think they weren’t actually people at all.

There was a CNA named Gwen who used to sneak me extra pudding cups. She was kind, always humming to herself, but I noticed her humming started to change—three-note phrases that weren’t quite musical. One day, I asked her what song it was. She froze mid-step, blinking slowly.

“Oh… just something my mother used to sing.”

Except the next time I asked, she said her grandmother taught it to her.

And the time after that, she said she’d heard it in church.

Same tune. Three different stories. Three different eyes, too. I don’t mean the color—I mean the way they held you. For some reason, when I looked at her, I thought of glass beads in a velvet bag.

By the following week, she didn’t speak to me at all.

I started keeping a list of dates and times, of people I’d seen acting strangely, and patients who were here one day and gone the next. I tore pages from my crossword book to do it, and tucked the notes under the cushion of my wheelchair. There were ten names before I stopped. Some I barely knew, some I’d played cards with. One had given me her dessert every Thursday without fail. All of them were now gone, always within two days of the full moon.

I circled the next one on the calendar with the tip of my thumbnail. It was only four days away.

I could feel them watching me more closely. They checked my vitals twice a day instead of once. They brought new lotion for my joints—it smelled like myrrh, which I hadn’t smelled since my wife’s funeral. One aide began taking notes while I attempted to transfer from the bed to the chair. I asked him why.

“New mobility assessment,” he said. “Standard policy.”

He was lying. They weren’t assessing me. They were measuring me, like tailors before a fitting.

And I was nearly ready.

* * * * * *

There’s an armchair in the second-floor dayroom at Stonefeld, tucked into the corner near the north-facing window. The cushion’s flat, the upholstery threadbare, but it gets the best sunlight in the afternoon and is just far enough from the television to think.

That’s where I found it.

I’d rolled myself there to avoid the hallway noise—one of the residents was shouting again, claiming someone had come into her room and “tried to open her chest like a file drawer.” No one listened, of course. They wheeled her off for calming meds and soft-voiced apologies. The usual.

I sat in the corner, thinking, trying to keep my mind moving like the therapists always told me.

Then I noticed something jammed between the seat cushion and the side rail. A Bible. One of the little pocket-sized ones they kept in the chapel, but worn almost to pieces. The spine was cracked, and the corners of the pages curled like old autumn leaves. It wasn’t one of the ones they handed out to residents. This one had been used extensively.

Inside were folded pieces of yellow notepad paper, stuffed into the book of Psalms.

The name on the first page stopped me cold.

Walter S. Kingsley. Room 205.

I remembered Walter. Tall, lean, quiet. World War II vet. Used to keep a photograph of his unit on the wall next to his bed. He died about a month after I arrived. The staff said he passed in his sleep, the same as everyone else.

I started reading.

The handwriting was messy but strong, written with a heavy hand, each word pressed forcefully into the page. The entries weren’t dated, but they became increasingly frantic as they progressed. At first, Walter wrote about his confusion—missing time, odd noises in the halls, the feeling of being moved while asleep.

Then it turned darker.

He described seeing “women in white” circling a man in the courtyard. Wrote that they “unfastened him” and “wore him like a choir robe.” He called them dancers, same as Mabel had, and said they “shimmer when they think no one’s watching.” He said they couldn’t hold their shape for long periods unless they wore someone else’s skin.

One line stood out, scribbled in the margin over and over: “They step into us like shoes.”

Then, in a different hand—still his, but more erratic, with ink smeared and edges torn—he mentioned a crucifix. A small wooden one, hidden in the courtyard.

“I buried it myself,” he wrote. “It’s an old church relic. Had it blessed by Father Delvecchio in ‘78 before he died. They won’t touch it. They won’t even look at it. It burns them.”

He claimed the crucifix was buried under the ivy near the old stone bench at the west wall. He claimed he’d snuck out during a fire drill to bury it after “seeing them too many times.”

He tried to tell people, but nobody believed him. He wrote that they came for him after he spoke up, and that they dosed him too high the next night, causing him to black out, and that he woke up with bruises he couldn’t explain.

The last page was a single sentence, scrawled in black marker: “If someone finds this, don’t let them wear you. Not even once. Not even a little.”

I sat in that chair long after the sun dipped below the trees, holding those pages like they were going to fall apart in my hands.

Walter had seen them, too.

It wasn’t just me. Or Mabel. Or Donnie. Or Cora.

And he’d left a weapon behind.

That night, I had a nightmare about the courtyard, but it wasn’t empty. In the dream, I was standing on the grass in my bare feet, the ivy cold against my ankles. I could hear the music, low and deep and endless. A shape with long arms and hollow eyes moved between the hedges, pulling on my skin like it was trying on a sweater. I couldn’t scream. But in the dream, I reached into the dirt and found something solid.

Wood. A cross.

The creature shrieked and vanished.

I woke soaked in sweat, my mouth tasting like copper. But I felt something else, too. Hope. I had a plan now. I didn’t know if the crucifix would still be there, or if I could reach it in time, or if it would even work, but I had direction. That was more than I’d had in weeks.

Outside, the moon was already starting to wax again. Three days. In three days, it would be full.

Three days until they danced again.

* * * * * *

The day before the full moon, without warning, they moved me to a different room. Their excuse was that there was a plumbing issue in my old one, and they claimed I’d be “more comfortable” in 107B, closer to the nurse’s station.

But I’d heard them, two aides talking just outside my door that morning.

“He’s ready,” one said.

“Can’t risk him seeing too much again.”

“We’ll prep him after lights out.”

That was enough. I knew what “prep” meant. I’d seen it.

So when the orderly came to wheel me down the hall, I smiled, nodded, and thanked him. I kept up the act, let him park me in the new room with its high, tiny window and too-thin curtain, and allowed him to plug in the call button. He told me he’d check in at midnight.

Then I waited.

I didn’t eat the dinner they brought. It was too risky. Instead, I just drank water from the tap and stashed the biscuits under the mattress.

I stayed awake the whole night before, staring at the ceiling, practicing flexing my right hand under the blanket. I could get the thumb and forefinger to meet now. It still hurt, but it moved. Outside my window, I watched as the sky turned the same soft, pale yellow it always did before dawn.

The next night would be the real one.

I knew that if I was going to get outside and find Walter’s crucifix, it had to be then, before they came.

I waited until after lights-out, around 1:45 a.m., when the halls were quiet, and slid out of bed like a corpse rolling into a grave. My legs fought me. One wanted to work; the other felt like it had forgotten how. I braced against the wall, panting quietly, sweat already beading down my back.

The wheelchair was beside the dresser. I made it there on my knees.

Getting in was harder. My right leg wouldn’t bend correctly. I used my left hand to hook the knee and swing it up. The pain made me gasp. I bit the inside of my cheek to stay silent.

Once seated, I moved slowly and quietly, creeping like a ghost. I made no sharp turns, and ensured my wheels didn’t squeak.

The fire door at the end of the hallway had a crash bar, but no alarm. I’d watched them use it during night transfers. It wouldn’t be locked. I prayed it wouldn’t be locked.

I reached it at 2:11 a.m. The moon—full, low, and white as bone—was visible through the glass pane. I pressed the bar, but nothing happened. There was no buzz, no sound at all. It swung open into the dark courtyard.

The air outside was colder than I expected. It wasn’t winter cold, but biting. I wheeled myself across the bricks, past the birdbath and the benches, toward the west wall—the one Walter had mentioned. The ivy was thick there, tangled and wet with dew. I reached into it and found nothing but stones and dirt at first. Then my hand hit something hard and ridged.

Wood.

I dug with both hands. My right barely worked, but it helped brace while I clawed with my left. The roots tore at my fingers. The soil filled my nails.

And then I found it: A small wooden crucifix, worn smooth, but still intact. I lifted it out of the dirt, trembling, and held it up.

That’s when I heard the door behind me close.

I turned the chair slowly. They were there, all of them—six figures in white, with faces I recognized but didn’t trust. Nurses who’d helped me bathe, aides who’d brought extra juice, people who knew my name and my entire life history. Now they looked hollow. Their smiles were unnaturally wide, their eyes sunken. Their movements were too synchronized, like insects walking in formation. The one in front wore Cora’s face. It didn’t fit as well as it had before. It sagged around the mouth.

She stepped forward. “You weren’t supposed to leave your room, George.”

Her voice came from under the face, wet and muffled, like someone talking through a damp towel.

Another stepped closer.

“You’ve seen too much. It’s time.”

I held up the crucifix, and the one in Cora’s skin immediately hissed and lunged. I didn’t think. I just shoved the cross forward and shouted the only thing that came to mind. “Get back!”

The crucifix made contact with her chest. The reaction was instant. She shrieked, and the skin on her face bubbled and folded inward. Smoke poured from her mouth as she staggered backward, limbs jerking.

The others stopped, watching and waiting. I waved the cross at them.

“Stay away!” I said. “I know what you are!”

One of them smiled and took a step forward. I held the cross higher.

“You think you’re the first?” she said. “You think you’re the only one who ever fought back?”

She raised her arm, and for a moment I saw the thing beneath—slick, gray, jointless, and rippling.

“They all lost, George.”

I spat on the ground. “Not tonight!” They flinched at the tone.

I rolled backward toward the fire door, keeping the crucifix up. My arms burned and my legs ached, but I kept moving. The first nurse—the one who wore Cora—was still twitching on the ground, shriveled and steaming. Her skin had crumpled like moldy paper. It smelled like rot and perfume.

The others didn’t follow.

I reached the door and closed it behind me, slamming the bar.

* * * * * *

I don’t remember what happened next. I don’t remember falling asleep or blacking out. All I could recall was the image of Cora’s face boiling away like wax near a flame.

Somehow, I ended up back in my room. I woke in restraints, surrounded by white sheets and white walls. The crucifix was gone.

They’d found me, and they were already rewriting the story.

When I came to, my arms were strapped to the bed with what they call “soft restraints,” the kind used for “combative” patients. My wrists itched beneath the nylon. My mouth was dry as paper. I could barely move my tongue. The room was different—brighter, sterile, and colder. I’d been moved to a private room. There were no photos or puzzle books, and no window view.

Did they expect me to pretend it never happened? 

The nurse on duty wore pink scrubs and a ponytail. I didn’t recognize her. Like the ones before her, she smiled too widely and said I’d had an “episode.”

“You were found outside, George, in the courtyard. You had a fall. You’re lucky someone noticed in time.”

I tried to speak. My throat barely worked.

“Where…?”

Ignoring my question, she patted my hand. “You’re safe. But you need rest.”

I wanted to scream and ask where the crucifix was—if they’d taken it, if they’d burned it, buried it again, thrown it in the incinerator with what was left of Cora’s skin. But I couldn’t form the words.

They kept me sedated for two days. The world came in slivers. Glimpses of tray tables, IV tubes, blurry faces checking my vitals with the flatness of someone inspecting fruit at the grocery store. I heard whispers from the hallway.

“Psych transfer was approved…” “…early onset paranoia, residual trauma…” “…one less liability during inspection week…”

One night, I pretended to be asleep while two staff members stood outside my door.

“He’s not going to make it through another cycle.”

“Doesn’t matter. He’ll be off our books by then.”

“Did they log it as a fall?”

“Of course. What else would it be?”

They didn’t know I was listening, or maybe they did and just didn’t care. Either way, I was scheduled for transfer to a psychiatric wing at a partner facility in Bloomington. I was told it had “more resources to meet my needs.” The tone was so calm, so professionally rehearsed, it almost made me doubt everything I’d seen.

Almost.

The morning of the transfer, a nurse I hadn’t seen before came in to check my vitals. She was younger, perhaps in her mid-twenties. She had silky brown hair, kept in a bun, and wore plain blue scrubs. She had no badge.

She closed the door behind her, checked that the curtain was drawn, and leaned down toward me.

“My name’s Lori,” she whispered. “Don’t say anything. Just listen.”

I stared at her.

“You’re not crazy,” she said. “I found the crucifix. I read the pages. I know what they are.”

My eyes welled before I could stop them. It was the first time I’d heard a real voice in what felt like weeks, a voice that didn’t belong to… them.

“I’m getting you out of here,” she said. “My brother’s on call with the ambulance crew doing your transport. I switched the paperwork. They think you’re being moved to psych. You’re not.” She slid a folded paper under my thigh. “When they wheel you out, stay quiet. I’ll be with you until the handoff. After that, he’ll drive you the rest of the way. No lights. No radio.”

She stood up, adjusted the IV bag, and checked her watch.

“Two minutes.”

She turned and walked out.

I held my breath and sat there, stunned, until the door opened again and the real transport team came in. Lori returned with them, holding the discharge file in one hand and pushing my chair with the other. No one questioned it or even looked at me closely. To them, I was just another resident heading off to the psych ward.

As we passed the nurse’s station, one of the night aides looked up. His smile twitched like static.

“Going somewhere, Mr. Marchand?”

I didn’t answer. Lori kept pushing until at last we reached the rear elevator. The ride down was silent. Downstairs, the ambulance was waiting just past the loading dock, with its engine running and its back doors open. Her brother was behind the wheel—a muscular guy, with tattoos on his forearms. He didn’t say much, but gave us both a knowing nod.

“Let’s go,” he said. “We don’t have much time.”

They lifted me in and buckled me down. Lori climbed in after me, sat beside the stretcher, and held my hand the whole ride.

She told me she’d been working at Stonefeld for three months and thought something was off from the beginning. The schedule shifts, the unexplained deaths, the way some residents seemed to vanish between documentation logs. Then she found Walter’s Bible—my Bible now—and started putting things together.

“I thought I was losing it,” she said, “until you showed up with dirt under your nails.”

We drove for over an hour. When we stopped, it was outside a small house on the edge of town—hers. I stayed there two nights. She fed me and let me rest. Together, we burned the pages in the backyard firepit. She said it felt like the only way to ensure they wouldn’t follow.

On the third day, I called my daughter and told her I wanted to come home.

I never went back to Stonefeld.

Lori didn’t either.

* * * * * *

I live alone now, in a little first-floor apartment on the south edge of town. It’s a corner unit with a back patio that faces the woods. It’s quiet out here. I hear birds in the morning and crickets at night. There are no intercom buzzers, and no med cart squeaks. Just… peace.

I’ve got my own routines. I make breakfast at 7, check my blood pressure, and do my stretches, if I’m feeling up to it. My speech is mostly back. I can read again. I can remember things. Most things.

Sometimes I wonder if my mind made it all worse than it was, if the stroke scrambled my perception so badly that everything I saw came out distorted on the other side. That’s what they would’ve said. Hell, it’s what most people would say if I told them now.

But I know what I saw, and I know how it felt. That kind of fear doesn’t come from nothing.

When I left Stonefeld, I brought two things with me: A wooden rosary that Lori gave me on the way out, and a page—just one—that I didn’t throw into the fire. It was the one Walter wrote near the end. The part where he said, “They step into us like shoes. But they only fit if you let go.”

I think about that line more than I should.

There were others who didn’t fight, or couldn’t, folks too far gone. People who didn’t even remember their own names by the end. For them, I think it was easier.

But I wasn’t ready to go, and I didn’t.

Sometimes I wonder if they can still feel me. I imagine the ones who wore Cora or Donnie or Mabel are still out there, limping around in borrowed skin.

I don’t know what they were, or if they were ever human at all. I don’t think it matters anymore.

Stonefeld is still open. I checked last month. They’ve got a functional website. The building has the same brick façade. “Reimagined wellness for the aging community,” their slogan reads. The staff photos are clean and bright. In them, everyone is smiling. On the staff listing page, there are dozens of unrecognizable names. They are all alien to me, except one.

Gwen. The aide who hummed that three-note phrase. She’s listed as a floor supervisor now.

I stared at her picture for a long time. Something about her expression unsettled me—it looked almost perfect. Too perfect. Like someone learning how to smile from a photograph.

They’re still there, wearing new names, waiting for new faces. I’m sure of it.

I’ve thought about going public with this—writing letters, calling newspapers, trying to find a way to expose them. But the truth is, it wouldn’t matter. Places like that swallow stories like mine whole. There’s always another explanation. Always another file marked “natural causes.”

And I’m tired. I’ve done what I can.

But I’ll say this: If you have a loved one in a long-term care facility—any facility—watch them closely. Not just for falls, medication errors, or bruises they can’t explain. Watch them around the full moon. Watch how the staff act when they think no one’s looking. Pay attention to how quickly the rooms get cleaned when someone dies. And if the death certificate says “peaceful” and you weren’t there to see it, ask questions. A lot of questions.

One last thing: If you get the call—the one no one wants—where the nurse on the line says your mother or your grandfather or your wife “passed quietly in the night,” and they ask whether you’d like to have them buried or cremated?

Choose cremation.

Don’t hesitate.

Don’t let anyone wear them.

Don’t give them another chance.