Night Shift and the HPLFF, night 2

Continuing on with Nightshift during downtime at the 2019 HP Lovecraft Film Festival. I’ve finally found room with a window, and I see that getting out of the hospital won’t be a help — it’s all Deep Dark Woods out there, no sign of the city where I live nor any other civilization, and probably full of werewolves and other nasties at least as bad as what’s in here.

Then I turn around and see in the bed behind me… the boneless woman. Whoever is doing all these weird experiments, has removed all of her bones, even the skull, and left them in a pile by the bed. Eew. I take an option to… get her a glass of water. It seems senseless, but she appreciates it. She tells me that doctor Carmichael did this to her, because he collects body parts apparently so he can collect super-powers? There’s nothing more I can do for her; although she asks to die, I don’t have access to morphine. 🙁

So I leave her asleep, and check out the ward across from me. The room is decorated with guts, like that one scene in Silence of the Lambs. And there’s an exhibit number painted in blood around this whole scene. Totally gross. The sight of intestines strung up like garlands, reminds me of that riddle back on the ICU computer, and I announce it to the empty room. Speak Guts And Enter! as they kinda-almost said in LoTR… and a spiral staircase appears in the floor, and I decide to follow it.

Part-way down the stairs, I come across a person who looks severely disheveled and slightly crazy. But it’s not the murdering-me type of crazy, so he’s okay in my book. He has blue-grey skin, he says because he is forced to eat silver as part of some experiments. (This is real: look up argyria; weird right?) I ask if it’s the same weirdo who did the boneless woman, Carmichael. He affirms, and gives me a silver chalice that he carries in his pocket (sure, why not? maybe I can eat it as a snack later and turn blue?) and he takes off a-running. Man, this place is full of weirdos.

Well, just keep on…

The spiral staircase ends inside a lab, or rather a collection of body parts in jars. The floor has a light mist around it, kind of like in Alien. The effect is very off-putting. I’m drawn to a human tongue in a jar, which has a number on it like the other body parts I’ve seen so far, and it has a note asking “free me” I break the jar on the floor, and the tongue’s human appears. She reiterates that Carmichael is stealing body parts, in order to accumulate super-powers; in her case, she could speak to animals. But if he’s after me, then presumably he thinks I have a super-power as well? And maybe I’m a woman and that’s my super-power? The woman is grateful for her tongue being freed, and gives me the ability to speak with animals! Nice.

And I step out into the ground floor, the main thoroughfare. I head for the main entrance foyer, even though I know that outside isn’t much better. But in classic horror-movie-nightmare fashion, the entrance is bricked up. Sigh. I rummage around in the cafeteria and find my choice of strange fetishes, an obsidian amulet and a snakeskin bracelet, and I decide to steal only one of them because stealing two would be wrong (huh?). I wander to the information desk, which is manned by… a gnome? I ask them how to get out of here, and they make a vague reference to an attic or a basement or a Crow or maybe a raven… Yeah, thanks a lot, guy. I turn around and leave.

I find my way back past the gift shop, where I meet a nice old lady who tells me that if I see a poster of Paris I can summon a demon, and a nice old man chained to a counter who says that I shouldn’t trust the woman. Seems legit!

Moving on, to the accident-and-emergency (A&E) department…