I'm a resident in a nursing home. One of the PSWs here is the FUCKING DEVIL!

When you’re the new resident at a nursing home, it’s a little like being the new kid in school. Or the new prisoner in the penitentiary, I suppose, depending on how you look at it.

I chose to view it as the former, and was happy when a friendly face popped into my room on the first day there.

“Welcome to Harmony Lake,” she said, smiling warmly. The woman was using a wheelchair and looked relatively young to be living in such a place. She was a short woman with a shaved head, a long scar running across the top of it. I guessed she was in her late fifties or early sixties.

“I’m Deborah, but everybody here calls me ‘Deb’,” She held out a green gift bag. I took it, saying thank you with genuine surprise in my voice. I hadn’t expected this at all, and the kind gesture brought a tear to my eye, despite the mundane nature of it all.

Inside the bag were coupons, flameless candles, and toiletries, as well as a T-shirt and a deck of playing cards.

“I’m the unofficial welcome wagon in this dump!”

“Ha! Nice to meet you. I’m Jane. That’s really decent of you, thanks.”

“It’s nothing. Just some crap from the Dollarama down the block. That’s about all we’ve got nearby here. It’s not like they give me a budget or anything. I just go out and buy the stuff myself. The cheapskates who own this place wouldn’t fork over two cents to bust the pope outta prison!”

Chuckling, I thanked her again for her generosity.

“So, speaking of the slammer… How’d you end up in here, anyways?” she asked. “You don’t look quite feeble enough to be in a place like this!” I could tell she was a card already, and couldn’t help but take an immediate shine to her.

“Well, you look pretty spry yourself, a hell of a lot healthier than me, I’ll bet. Never smoked a day in my life but wouldn’t you know I caught the damn COPD and now it’s probably gonna kill me one of these days. Will kill me if something else doesn’t do the job first.”

I had to take a few deep wheezing breaths before I could finish my thought. The inhalers were still packed up somewhere in a big Ziploc bag. I ignored the strangled, rattling sound coming from my chest and fought through it, telling myself I needed to cut down. The stuff was making me so jittery lately.

“To be honest it’s going to be a relief having other folks around. I had a fall a few months back and couldn’t make it to the phone. Almost died on the living room floor, and would have if my neighbour hadn’t come by to check in on me. My breathing is so bad these days I get winded just walking to the bathroom.”

I left out the fact that I wasn’t there by choice. My only son who lived down in Florida had made the decision for me after I was admitted to the hospital with a broken hip. I missed my apartment badly already. My eyes kept going to the bed on the other side of the room where someone else would be sleeping, just a few feet away from me. I wondered what they would be like, but didn’t want to sound like a gossip so I didn’t ask.

“Well, we’re happy to have you here. It’s nice to have another person around who you can actually talk to.”

We chatted for a little while longer and then Deb said she would head back to her room so that I could finish unpacking my things. I got the feeling she was just being polite since I was clearly struggling to keep up the conversation on my end. It had been a long day and the cold weather wasn’t helping anything. I decided that I would need the rescue inhaler after all, and would use it right after she left.

Just as she was about to go, she said one last thing that stuck with me.

“Listen, I don’t want to scare you, but I feel like I have to tell you... This is a good place, it really is, but there’s a dark side to it as well. Just, be careful. And watch out for Gwendolyn, the PSW. I can’t talk about it too much, but just try to stay on her good side. And whatever you do – don’t let her touch you.”

Without another word she rolled out of the room and was gone, leaving me in stunned silence.

Watch out for Gwendolyn, the PSW. Don’t let her touch you.

What in the world did that mean? It sounded like she was scared of one of the staff members in the nursing home. I debated going straight to the nurse at the desk but decided to hold off until after I had spoken to Deb again.

An hour later I met Gwendolyn the PSW (that’s Personal Support Worker for those of you out there who are unfamiliar with the abbreviation – essentially it means a nurse’s aide.) She was a middle-aged woman with bleached blonde hair and dark bags under her eyes. Her ill-fitting scrubs had pictures of cartoon princesses all over them and her face was plastered with far too much makeup.

She walked in carrying a bag of chips which she proceeded to eat in front of me while speaking with her mouth full. She talked loudly, spraying masticated chip crumbs into the air occasionally.

“Jane, how you doin’ today, girl? You’re settling in, I see. Good, that’s so good. Listen, I heard you were talking with Deb and okay, let me tell you, that lady is a total whacko. Anything she says you gotta just like, in one ear, out the other, just ignore it – you can ask anyone – she’s got this compulsive lying streak. Especially if it’s about me, because seriously, she totally hates me for some reason.”

I wasn’t really sure what to say or who to believe, but it wasn’t her. When people start a conversation by telling you your newest friend is a pathological liar and mentally unstable to boot, it usually doesn’t give a good first impression.

I just said, “Okay.”

Ignoring my body language and polite attempts to ask for privacy, she went over to my dresser and began to pick up my things and look at them. Pictures of my family, my books and heirlooms, she grabbed them and put them back crooked or in the wrong place entirely. Everything she touched I saw the greasy stain from her fingertips on afterwards, and she began to lick her fingers clean from the grease and salt of the chips before moving on to my books, which she started to paw at next.

I remembered Deb’s advice and decided I should at least be decent with her, despite my growing disgust, since we were likely going to be around each other a lot. As much as it pained me, I gave her a little smile and tried to talk with her about something mundane, hoping it would lure her away from my bookshelf before she could reach my treasured first editions. I didn’t know what I would do if she tried to touch me, but the mere thought of it terrified me now for reasons I still didn’t understand.

“It’s so nice to meet you, Gwendolyn. Have you worked here long?” I managed to say, trying to kill her with kindness as I had always been taught to do. Just making polite conversation, I thought.

She raised her eyebrows and laughed in response, as if the mere thought of me trying to converse with her as an equal was a hilarious joke to her.

“I’ve worked here a long, long time. I know the boss upstairs. We’re close. Real, real close.” Her eyes seemed to shimmer a shade bluer as she spoke and I found myself no longer wanting to question her. I began to feel very tired as she looked into my eyes and wanted badly to go to sleep. She looked away and the feeling vanished.

As if she could tell exactly which book was my favourite, Gwendolyn picked up my copy of Douglas Adams’ ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ and started flipping through it with her greasy hands. Even from where I was sitting I could see the stains she was leaving all over the pages.

She threw it haphazardly onto the bed and walked out of the room without saying another word, crumpling up and tossing her now-empty bag of chips towards the small garbage can on the way out. The bag drifted lazily down to the floor and she took a glance at it and left it there.

“Well, fuck me.” I rolled my eyes and walked over to the garbage can, picked up the bag, and threw it in the bin.

When I looked up she was standing there, in the doorway to my room, as if she had never left.

“Did you say something? I thought I heard you say something.”

“No.”

She glared at me with her cold blue eyes for a few seconds, her hands up on the doorframe on either side. Now that I was standing in front of her I noticed how tall she was. At least six foot.

“I didn’t think so. We’re gonna get along like gangbusters, you and me, I can tell already, Jane!”

I bit my tongue and nodded, watching in frustration as she walked off. I heard her two doors down yelling in an artificially cheery tone as another unfortunate resident responded timidly to her.

At least she hadn’t tried to touch me.

*

Later that evening at dinner, I asked Deb about the whole “no touching” thing.

“Shhh, not here. We’ll talk about it later,” she told me conspiratorially.

Gwendolyn walked by just after that and I noticed her scowling in Deb’s direction. The nurse came over and asked me if everything was alright and I said it was, although I had an inkling that was going to prove to be a lie.

Later that evening we were back in my room. My room-mate was out somewhere and this actually afforded us some rare degree of privacy. Although they didn’t allow us to close the door to the room because of “safety precautions.”

“Can you finally tell me what’s going on? She was in here earlier and I could tell there was something off about her, but I couldn’t tell what it was.” I was already beginning to forget about how I had felt when I looked into her eyes, the memory of that fading like a dream upon waking.

Deb sighed and looked at me, shaking her head.

“I want to tell you… I do. But I’m afraid of how you’ll react. It’s going to sound nuts.”

“I’ll keep an open mind. Come on, just tell me! The worst I’ll say is that I don’t believe you.”

She looked at me for a few seconds and then told me her theory.

“You wouldn’t be the first person to tell me I’m crazy, but I’m not. The ones who didn’t believe me, they ended up regretting it. Listen, whatever you do, just don’t let her touch you. Find any excuse you can think of.”

For a few moments I tried to gauge if this was just some prank, or if she actually believed that Gwendolyn had some sort of evil supernatural power.

“Tell me more.”

*

It was a while before anything transpired between Gwendolyn and myself. But when things did come to a head, everything happened so fast. Looking back on the time after I arrived at Harmony Lake up until the incident, it was the calm before the storm, but all the while the pressure had been building up.

In the following months after moving in, I made friends around the place pretty quickly. There was Reggie, a tall well-spoken British fellow, who was a jokester and full of stories from his war days, flying bomber jets. Tabitha, a woman who walked with a cane and a slight limp, and organized the weekly BINGO on Friday nights.

I didn’t mention Deb’s theory directly to them, but instead asked what they thought of Gwendolyn the PSW.

“She’s a bit of a slob, but other than that I don’t know much about her,” said Tabitha one afternoon as we were sitting in the lounge. “Reg and I are pretty independent so we don’t really deal with the PSWs too much except the odd time we need a hand with something silly, like warming up a cup of coffee or grabbing some toiletries from the supply room. I’ve heard she’s always working with the sickest residents – the ones who die just a few days or weeks later.”

This matched up exactly with Deb’s theory. At least it seemed to.

Although I talked to Reggie and Tabitha and a few other residents, Deb and I became very close. I’d go watch TV in her room with her some nights or we’d sit and chat after dinner, getting to know each other better and regaling each other with stories from our pasts.

My room-mate during all this time was a lonesome woman named Elizabeth, who refused to be nice to anyone and seemed jaded and angry about her place in the world and where she had ended up. She was in her early fifties and I found out she was dying of cirrhosis of the liver. Her belly was swollen and distended, causing her great discomfort, and she complained bitterly about the staff neglecting her, despite it seeming to me like they spent more time with her than almost anyone.

I tried to say kind things to her and cheer her up, would bring her ginger ales and coffee made just how she liked it (5 creams, 6 sugars, blech!), but her responses to my gestures were always cutting and sarcastic, impossibly negative, so I eventually began speaking with her less and less and started trying to avoid her.

Does that make me a bad person? I suppose maybe it does. Still, she would see me walking by on my way to the dining room (since my bed was nearest the window and hers was by the door I had no choice but to walk past her) and she would stop me and hold me up to rant on and on about her absent family and the incompetent staff members at Harmony Lake.

I realized quickly that she was a world-class narcissist and had no interest in anyone but herself. Not only that, but she never stopped talking, always going on and on about self-obsessed drivel. So I decided to mostly try and avoid her. I’m sorry if that sounds terrible, but she was toxic. The more I got to know her the more obvious it was to me – there was something dark inside of her, something evil and spiteful had possessed her at some point.

This must sound ludicrous, the idea that two evil presences lived within the same nursing home together, but I found that it was true. Both Gwendolyn the PSW and Elizabeth the resident were possessed by things not of this world. And on top of that, they were both woefully ignorant of each other’s presence.

It makes sense, I suppose. If you were a demon set loose on earth and you wanted to go somewhere quiet and neglected where you wouldn’t be noticed, a nursing home seems like a quite reasonable option. With all the issues people have in these places, a demon-possessed raving maniac would hardly even be noticed, especially on some units that specialize in those types.

As it happened, Gwendolyn volunteered to take on the role of caring for Elizabeth as her health declined. I watched her carefully when she came into the room, observing for any signs of what Deborah had suggested. But she always made sure to close the curtains and never did anything untoward. At least as far as I could tell.

It was towards the very end that I could tell Elizabeth was going to go. The thing inside of her would have to find another host soon, since the poor woman’s body was about to give up.

The PSWs and nurses were making their rounds more and more frequently, speaking in hushed tones about how “She would be going soon”. The woman’s breathing had become shallow and sporadic. Her face was a greyish-yellow jaundiced mask of death. Her eyes barely opening and never speaking or moving anymore except to scream when they turned her, trying to prevent bedsores.

Gwendolyn was in there with her one night, had closed the door and drawn the curtains around them, and I tried to figure out how I could observe them without being seen.

I waited for the right moment and got into my bed from the chair at the window, moving as quietly as I could so Gwendolyn would still think I was by the window, unable to see.

Pulling back the curtain ever so slightly with my foot, I saw Gwendolyn hunched over Elizabeth, and an eerie blue glow was emanating from her eyes.

She had her mouth open wide and was holding it over Elizabeth’s, the faint blue glow of her eyes casting the woman green when combined with the yellow of her jaundiced flesh.

I watched for as long as I dared and then closed the curtain again, my breathing suddenly laboured and wheezing. What I had just seen terrified me, for I knew now that what Deb had warned me of was true. I had only suspected it before, but now it was undeniable.

“Jane?”

Gwendolyn’s voice calling from the other side of the curtain sent shivers down my spine. Suddenly I was feeling palpations in my chest, my heart pounding like an offbeat drum.

“What did you see, Jane?”

I saw her silhouette behind the curtain as she moved towards me and my heart hammered faster and harder as she pulled it back.

Her pale blue eyes were glowing eerily as she looked at me, shaking her head.

“Tsk, tsk, Jane. You shouldn’t be spying on your neighbours. Now I’ll have to make sure you can’t tell anyone.”

“No, please no. I won’t say anything.” I felt my will to fight diminishing as she stared at me with her cold eyes.

“Lie down in the bed, Jane.”

I did as she told me, despite the protests of my mind, my body seemed unwilling or unable comply with anything except for the commands of Gwendolyn the PSW.

Laying down, I looked up at the ceiling and awaited my fate.

But the next moment I felt free again, as if I was no longer under her control.

I looked up at her and saw her eyes were not blue anymore, but green. She stood there, twitching. Her body began to rock back and forth as if she were having a violent seizure.

Gwendolyn’s eyes filled with blood. It began to pour and stream out from them and dripped down to the floor. I could see the war now, going on inside of her.

The thing that had been inside Elizabeth was so narcissistic that it had not noticed the being that lived inside of Gwendolyn, and vice versa. The two demons, or whatever they were, were now locked in a battle to the death inside the one remaining host.

Gwendolyn had consumed Elizabeth’s spirit and with it, she had taken the thing that lived inside of her.

The woman’s body began to violently heave and bloat, her belly distended and massive one moment, then her arms becoming edematous and breaking open in long, sloughing gashes.

Her flesh started to melt and sizzle and poured off of her bones. Her gleaming white skull revealed as the fat and muscle began to run and drip like candle wax.

She began to scream, the pitch rising higher and higher.

Then she collapsed into a puddle on the floor which smoked and reeked of sulphur.

I got up and jumped over it, running to the door, worried about what would happen if I breathed in that smoke.

Now there were two demons roaming around, looking for a host.

And I had just seen what happens if they pick the same one.

JG

TCC