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Rose Garden Sanatorium made it to Top 30 in an Award!
If you’ve been following what I do on WattPad, you may have noticed that I have submitted to a few awards recently (as well as WattPad studios, which is another story!)
One of the awards I submitted was to the Earnesty Writer’s Awards 2018 – two books have been submitted, ‘Rose Garden Sanatorium’ and ‘I fell in Love with a Psychopath’ into two very different genres.
Today, I got a notification to say they’ve got the results for the Top 30 Paranormal and Horror/ Mystery/ Thriller genre, and my book ‘Rose Garden Sanatorium’ got through! 😀
Check out the results here: [voting ended]
I’m super exciting, because that one is my favourite and it would be absolutely amazing if I won something!
If I don’t, it’ll still be brilliant that I get a few new people reading my work, and hopefully build up my popularity. 🙂
If you want to see what all the fuss is about, check it out here: [links no longer exist, sorry!]
Looking forward to find out if the other one does any good on the Earnesty Writer’s Awards, as well as the other Awards I submitted to… Including the famous Watty Awards! 😀
Rose Garden Sanatorium – Chapter 2
Note: If you’re new to the story please read the Prologue here!
Chapter 2
Taylor
Taylor gasped and woke bolt upright in a panic, sweat dripping down her face and back. She stared wide-eyed out into the darkness of her room trying to gather her bearings and calm her erratic heartbeat.
“What…?” she muttered to herself in the middle of the darkness. Of course, she was alone. She was always alone. No one was there to hear her.
She rubbed her clammy face nervously and peeled her reddish-brown hair off her forehead. She then span round to pick up her phone, which was sat untouched on her dark brown and cheap bedside table, resting next to the half-empty bottle of whisky. She pressed the button on the front of it and the room lit up from the screen. 22:11 flashed at her from the dark. With a groan of frustration, she threw herself back onto the bed. It was still Thursday night, it wasn’t even the morning yet.
She draped her thin arm over her forehead for a few minutes, going over the strange dream that had evidently woken her up; a strange red creature was laughing at her. It had large horns protruding angrily from his head, sharp yellowing teeth behind an evil grin, black leathery wings spread intimidatingly wide and a sharp tail wiping back and forth as if mocking her.
Along with a strange burning smell that she could almost still feel lingering in her nostrils, she heard voices; shouting, yelling, crying and screaming. The sounds pierced through her as if they weren’t coming through her ears but through her soul—
Suddenly her head came alive with voices and she gasped, bolting upright again. They got louder and louder the more she thought of them, until she closed her eyes instinctively and they suddenly vanished.
She opened her eyes again, carefully looking out into the darkness in fear. She was very much alone. Pushing the crazy thoughts back, she grabbed the bottle of whisky from the bedside table with a slight grumble and took a large swig. Clearly she was imagining things, she hadn’t slept properly in days, and it was obviously starting to take its toll. She had work in the morning too and she already wasn’t looking forward to it. At least the whisky would make it easier to bear for now.
She took another large swig of the liquor, replaced it on the bedside table and collapsed back on her bed. She closed her eyes while trying desperately not to think about the strange dream but instead focus on trying to sleep.
***
The next morning, Taylor stood in her compact kitchen trying desperately to ignore a raging headache. She managed to drink the remainder of her whisky last night, just to get to sleep. She regretted it of course… she had no alcohol left.
She grabbed a cereal box from the cupboard above her sink and poured the contents into a bowl that was already sat on top of the kitchen counter top. The news was playing in the background on her small cheap TV, which was sat lonely in the living-room. She watched it while shoving large spoonfuls of cereal into her mouth and lent against the divide between the kitchen and her living-room.
She had luckily managed to find some clothes after having a shower, changing out of yesterday’s shirt that she fell asleep in, and was now dressed in yesterday’s simple black work trousers and a plain white—yet thankfully clean—t-shirt. It wasn’t a work t-shirt, it was actually an unused gym t-shirt, although it was plain enough. But just in case, she wore a black jacket over the top of it anyway. The jacket was well-worn, the colour was fading on the outside, the reminisce of the old dark black was seen around the breast pocket and the sleeves were starting to fray where they were slightly too long—which she liked, as it kept her wrists warm. She always seemed to get cold, especially at work when the air-conditioning was always on, even during the winter.
She watched the news play while a frown steadily creeped onto her face. Something had caught her attention.
“A young man by the name of Samuel Chaudhary has been reported missing, his mother last saw him at six o’clock yesterday. He is reported to have gone out with friends after having dinner with his parents but has not returned home since. Samuel is twelve years old and may have been out with friends of the same age…” explained a news reporter with a tight blonde bun. The woman wore a sympathetic face that appeared to be just the right level of professionalism without looking upset at the report or too happy. Taylor hated that, seeing a news reporter that looked too happy when reporting bad news.
Taylor wondered what it would be like for that poor mother, knowing that her son didn’t come home that evening. She wished she had a mother who would be worried about her own whereabouts if she went missing. What if she were to just pack a bag of essentials and disappear? Not show up at work. Not tell anyone she was leaving. Would anyone care? Her own mother had died a long time ago, a particular time of her life that she wasn’t too keen on remembering. She had no other family. No father, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, not even grandparents. It was always just her and her mother. It wasn’t until recently that she started to wonder why there was no other family, it never occurred to her before that it was a little odd. Her hand automatically went up to the small scar on her cheekbone, a habit that she had only recently gotten into.
The news reporter moved on to the next piece of news; explaining a strange sighting of a flying animal seen in the early hours of the morning. But Taylor snorted at the media hype of what was probably just an escaped parrot or something and turned off the TV. She remembered there was something like that that happened before, and it turned out to be a large African Grey parrot, someone’s pet that had accidentally escaped and caused a bit of a stir.
After eating the last spoonful of cereal, she placed the bowl lazily in the sink unwashed with the rest of the unwashed plates, bowls, cutlery and even a discarded pizza box from two nights ago and grabbed her work ID from the side. She had to leave early anyway, she needed something from the shop. Something which she was supposed to have left of last night if she didn’t drink the whole bottle. It was Friday today, she would need it after she got home… it was going to be a busy day.
***
Taylor sat slouched on her usual bus in a daze, the number 277, which she caught from her usual bus stop at 07:15. She stared out of the window, her face resting lazily in her right hand, while her arm was resting on the side of the bus’s window frame uncomfortably, watching the pitiful world go by while the sun made an appearance for another day, creating deep oranges and yellows against the dark gloomy clouds.
She watched a young woman attempting to walk down the road in the opposite direction the bus was travelling, a red-faced screaming toddler squirming in his pushchair as the young mother apparently still half-asleep spoke into her mobile phone. Taylor wondered who she was talking to. A boyfriend? A friend? A work-colleague to explain she was going to be late for work yet again because her son didn’t want to put on his shoes again?
This led Taylor to wonder what everyone else in the world was up to. She wondered if maybe there were others out there that had lives more interesting than hers. Or at least lives they liked. Or did everyone else in the world get up every weekday, to go to a boring job, only to come home to eat and sleep, drowning their sorrows into a bottle of whisky at the weekends? Although those days were starting to seep into the weekdays now. She wondered what her life would be like if things changed? What if she didn’t have to drink? What if… her life had more meaning?
Before she had chance to daydream about what her life would be like if she didn’t have to work, didn’t rely on alcohol anymore and that she had a bigger greater purpose in the world, she felt a strange feeling resurface in her chest. She re-focused her eyes out of the window and glimpsed someone walking unsteadily from a road. There was something unusual about him that caught her attention.
Luckily the bus slowed down for a set of works traffic lights which had moved from amber to a rather definitive and resounding red and thus giving Taylor a direct view of the road on her right. The road was more like a side street that followed up the side of the bridge that the bus had just emerged from. There was a black BMW sat on the pavement facing up the road on guard, a large blue gate which was open to allow people to explore, but the street only seemed to hold some sort of shops or buildings that were utilizing the space under the bridge, their graffiti-riddled shutters down and looking unused for years. On the other side, tucked in a corner, was an overflowing dumpster with litter of soggy paper and carboard left abandoned around it.
The man she saw walking out from the street was now holding himself up against the blue gate, slightly silhouetted against the rising sun behind him. He was wrapped up in some sort of fabric to keep himself warm, his slightly dark yet young face looked sunken and in pain, dark circles framed his strange eyes. She would have just thought the poor guy was just a homeless person out on his luck looking like he had just resurfaced from a safe place to squat for the night. But those eyes didn’t sit well with her. She wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the light or something, because of the sunrise behind him and the typically British cloudy day.
The bus jerked forward again to continue past the now green traffic lights, knocking Taylor’s elbow off the window edge and breaking her eye contact. But not before the man managed to look right at Taylor. His face furrowed into a curious frown as if he somehow knew she had been there watching him.
But those dark eyes weren’t just dark… they were completely pitch black.
When she looked back out of the window to the exact spot the man was, he had somehow vanished. She attempted to press her face to the window in order to look down the road behind the bus and even looked across to the opposite side of the road where another street ran up the other side of the bridge, but there was no sign of the strange man.
What also made her blood run cold was not only those pitch-black eyes, reminding her of the creature in her dream, but she realised she experienced the same feeling she had in her dream too. A feeling she couldn’t quite explain, it was just there in the depths of her being. It was like trying to explain that she heard voices, but they didn’t come to her ears, but from within… so was that strange feeling.
Suddenly a mixture of voices came into her head again, just like they did last night. She gasped and closed her eyes tightly and pointlessly shut as the inside of her head came alive with a mumbling and muffling mess of sounds. She knew it was talking, but she couldn’t make out words let alone sentences. She held her hands to her temples and groaned, the more she thought of them, the louder they got.
“SHUT UP!” she yelled suddenly, her voice reverberating in her ears. The voices stopped. Only the hum of the bus’s engine and the surrounding traffic was heard. No talking.
She blinked and looked up, seeing a few faces nervously staring at her from their seats around her. Of course, the voices were in her head, no one else could hear them.
Am I going mad? she thought to herself, as she deliberately diverted her attention to the outside world once again. Even the bus driver was looking in his rear-view mirror to see what the fuss was about.
She sighed and took the bottle of alcohol that she had bought from the shop that morning from her backpack, she had told herself she wasn’t going to take even a sip until she was home and could finally relax. But it didn’t take her a lot to convince herself she needed a sip. Ignoring the strange look she was getting from a young girl in the seat on the opposite side of the bus, Taylor unscrewed the cap and took a large swig of the calming liquid.
Click here to read the next chapter!
~~~
If you liked this story, please check out my other works!
New Story Idea – “I fell in Love with a Psychopath”
New Story idea! – Butterfly House
Check out these other posts about Rose Garden Sanatorium!
Rose Garden Sanatorium – Chapter 1
If you’re new to the story, please read the prologue here!
Chapter 1
Parliamentary Private Secretary Martha Dunn
The doors swung open suddenly making Martha jump. Her cup of tea splashed all over her white blouse and dull grey skirt. She was standing in a room off the White Drawing Room, one of the nineteen State Rooms in the building, when he bounded in; a tall, dark haired and magnificently handsome man.
She had never seen such confidence in anyone before, the man strode in with such authority that she wasn’t sure if he had more right to be there than the man she worked for; the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom himself. Accompanied with his confidence, came a sense of power and intrigue that sent shivers down Martha’s spine.
She realised that she had never seen this man before, normally she was good at recognising people who come through Number Ten. He wore a black peacoat with the collar up, a simple grey scarf tucked underneath to hide his neck from a cold that Martha wasn’t sure currently existed this time of year, supplemented with a pair of simple dark blue jeans and black shoes to match his look. Although Martha wasn’t sure what look he was going for, if he was indeed going for a look. People who walked through the office usually had either the; I’m an important person you must respect me or the I’m a rich person with a large bank balance look. The newcomer was hard to read.
Aside from his attire, he appeared younger than most of the people that walked through the hall. He had short black stubble framing his sharp masculine facial-features handsomely, his dark short hair looked windswept and interesting. Martha certainly thought he was interesting, but she also had a horrible feeling he was trouble. How did he even get in?
“David in?” he asked, as he waltzed passed her.
“Y–you can’t g–go in there!” she stuttered, her confidence gone and she started to visibly shake. She held onto her now empty cup of tea in one hand and her work phone in the other, both currently forgotten about as she watched in shock.
He stopped, turned and gave her a smile, finding her reaction amusing. The double doors were only a foot behind him.
She suddenly looked around for the security guards. Where are they? she thought, ignoring the wetness on her chest as the tea soaked through her clothes.
“No?” he tested. He raised an eyebrow at her, holding his handsome yet devilish smile.
“No,” she said with a little more confidence, but then added; “un–unless you h–have an appointment?” She doubted he did, it was late at night. The only reason she was there was because a meeting was overrunning.
The man walked up to Martha and stared into her brown tired eyes. She felt suddenly inferior to him, he was much taller than she was and towered above her. Plus, her simple loosely fitted grey suit, greying brown hair with natural fuzzy curls and her slightly wrinkly round face was no match to him.
“And what if I don’t have an appointment?” he breathed.
The woman wobbled on her feet and silently wished there were more seats at Number Ten. She swallowed nervously and stared back into his piercing blue eyes. “Then I w–will have t–to call security.”
“You could try, but they’re all unconscious.” He smirked, then walked away. Without another moment’s hesitation he bounded through the big double doors to where the Prime Minister was holding a meeting.
The secretary stood wordlessly, her mouth slightly agape in awe. After a few seconds, she rushed out of the room towards the main staircase and peered over the ornate black and dark wooden banister to see one of the security team was led face down next to the large world globe at the bottom and gasped in horror.
***
Belphegor
“David!” Belphegor bellowed, his arms wide open as he bounded into the extravagant White Drawing Room.
The room was too elaborate for his taste, white walls with gold decorations, gold trims on the high ceiling, gold frames around the paintings, even the sofas near the fireplace and the pointless chandeliers hanging heavily from the ceiling had some unnecessary gold. The only thing not gold was the large rug in the middle of the floor which was red with a few splashes of blue in the fleur de-lis. There was probably more money in this building than there had gone into running the whole of London.
The Prime Minister, who was standing and talking to a balding man in a chair opposite him, span round to see Belphegor stride into the room. Belphegor even heard the Parliamentary Private Secretary, Martha, rush in behind him.
David Stewart was a young Prime Minister, taking up the position confidently only last year—much to the dismay of many of the Members of Parliament in the opposing parties who disagreed that Stewart was fit for the position. Stewart was in his late thirties, described to be a ‘young hip Prime Minister’ by a local newspaper recently, a short man with a square face, although attractive in a boyish way. He was in the process of holding a private meeting with his Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs; MP John Didcot.
John Didcot was a balding middle-aged man, with a heart-shaped face. He had little bags under his grey-blue eyes, which sat underneath a mess of unruly eyebrows that were currently furrowed into a frown. Unlike the Prime Minister, who was wearing a sharp black suit, Didcot was wearing a navy-blue suit which looked a size too big for him and a rather long red tie that appeared to curl slightly at the end.
“Who are you?” the Prime Minister asked, his face visibly falling and shifting into an unfamiliar nervous stare. “And how did you get in?”
Belphegor wasn’t surprised that the guy didn’t know him, they hadn’t formally met. But Belphegor had suspected Stewart had been given a file all about him when he first made it to office, there were bound to be pictures of him in there over the years. Of course, humans weren’t too good with remembering faces from pictures and some pictures were probably very old.
Didcot moved slowly to perch on the edge of his seat as if waiting to get up at an opportune moment if he needed to run for the exit. Belphegor walked further into the room, grabbed an apple from a fruit bowl on top of a rather elaborate oak dresser and leaned against it.
“I’m sure you’re aware of who I am,” Belphegor replied finally, as he carefully inspected the apple in his hand before looking up at Stewart. “My friends call me Bel.”
He was teasing them slightly; he doubted anyone in the room would recognise the name ‘Bel’, even if it was an unusual name. It was just a nickname. One of his more favourable nicknames. But he wanted to drag out this situation as long as possible. He wasn’t going to make it that easy for them. Call it punishment for the last seventy years he had to endure. Sure, this meeting was pressing, but it was pointless, the proverbial cat was already out of the bag. He was just doing his bit.
He also ignored the last question about how he got in. Although he could have told the truth, he didn’t do anything too out of the ordinary, the security practically let him in. Even if he did knock them unconscious to avoid interrupting his unscheduled meeting. But it was the wrong question Stewart needed to ask, so he wasn’t going to answer it.
“Bel?” the balding man spoke nervously. “What do you want? Are you going to kill us?”
Belphegor looked at Didcot and smiled at him. “Don’t be silly, John. If I wanted to kill you, I would have done so years ago!”
Belphegor had walked passed Didcot once as he made his way home. He knew Didcot, he made sure he knew all the Members of Parliament. He knew all the world leaders and important figures. In fact, he kept up to date with the news all around the world. He recognised Didcot easily when he passed him. He even made sure Didcot saw him as he walked deliberately close by and smiled playfully at him. Didcot wasn’t too pleased with this, giving him a rather rude comment and mentioned ‘the youth of today’. Belphegor thought it was highly amusing since there was a large age gap, but not the way Didcot had thought.
But Didcot not only wouldn’t know who Belphegor was by meeting him on the street, he would never remember as well as Belphegor that they had actually met briefly. His memory was naturally less superior than Belphegor’s.
Didcot suddenly stood up and made a run for the door, nearly tripping over his own feet before disappearing noisily out the doors towards the staircase. Belphegor just watched him and lazily took a bite from the apple in his hand. He had no intention of running after him. He wasn’t here to speak to Didcot. It was, in fact, better Didcot wasn’t in the room.
The Prime Minister stood staring at Belphegor for a few seconds before he looked over at his Parliamentary Private Secretary, Martha, who had now broken a nervous sweat. She must have seen the body of the security guard currently lying unconscious on the floor downstairs. He was alive, but Martha didn’t know that. She looked at the Prime Minister and then down at the mobile phone in her hand, and then back up at the Prime Minister.
“Shall I call the police?” she whispered slightly, trying to talk only to David, but Belphegor could hear her, he had better hearing than all of them.
“The police?” Belphegor snorted. “Not a wise idea!” He folded his arms across his chest, looking from Martha to Stewart, enjoying their discomfort.
“Are you going to explain who you are and what you want?” The Prime Minister tore his face away from his personal secretary and looked back at the strange man interrupting his meeting. His voice had risen angrily and authoritatively.
Belphegor looked at the Prime Minister, his smile faded and was now looking serious. “My name is Belphegor and it might be in your best interest to listen to me.” He then calmly and deliberately took another bite from the apple. At this the Prime Minister’s face fell. Belphegor knew he would at least recognise his birth name, he would have been undoubtedly told about him the day he became Prime Minister. It was all in that file; Belphegor’s personal file the government had on him. He’d seen it before, it was pretty big. Stewart probably even had a debriefing with Duncan himself, the Director General of the most secret government service there was. Belphegor wondered if he would have taken up the position if he knew about him before running for Prime Minister, his whole world would have been turned upside down upon learning about the secret world that had been hidden for decades. And one of the most fearful beings from that secret world was currently standing right in the middle of Ten Downing Street, right in front of him, looking very human.
Click here to read the next chapter!
~~~
If you liked this story, please check out my other works!
New Story Idea – “I fell in Love with a Psychopath”
New Story idea! – Butterfly House
Check out these other posts about Rose Garden Sanatorium!
The Girl Who Whispered 