The Curse of Friday the 13th, Day 3, Part 8

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Length (rounded up): 1900 words, 7 min. 30 sec.
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The Curse of Friday the 13th, Day 3, Part 8
Friday the 13th, 7:41 p.m.

‘I expected to get bigger ones.’

Julie, examining her new casts, made a disgruntled face, but the additional casts were not too small, not in the least.

After the day-long series of accidents, rigid dressing confined all her limbs, enveloped her head, and completely coated her torso. The latest car accident had added two new items to the long list of her old casts: a velpeau cast and a hip spica cast.

As before, a hard, dome-formed plaster mould arched over her head and encircled the back part of her skull. A palm-sized opening was left at the front of the spherical head cast, between her eyes and mouth to act as a window for her face.

The other segments of the heavy plaster casts wrapped tightly around her neck, making it impossible for her to move her head. Deeply nested in the Minerva cast, she was able to look only straight ahead. The firmly cemented shield around her trunk maintained each bit of her body between the neck and the loins in a stiff pose, serving as an important node for the spica casts spreading out to lock down three of her limbs.

A neatly shaped shoulder spica cast incapacitated her right arm, solidly flowing from the armpit, running over the flexed elbow to reach the fingertips. Her arm was pushed up at shoulder height, kept far away from the core cast capturing her body. Although her fingers and thumbs escaped restraints, they just hung uselessly out of the end opening of the chunky SSC.

Just like her right arm, the newly injured left one was fully moulded in white material. But its confiner wasn’t a shoulder spica cast but a velpeau cast, which was tightly attached the badly wounded limb to the flat surface of the plaster corset.

Unluckily for the poor patient, her lower limbs were also in poor health. Captured in a freshly applied hip spica cast, Julie's left leg was in a rigid restriction, and fitted seamlessly into the body cast. The other leg, restrained merely in a separate long leg cast that stretched from her thigh to her foot, rested on a sponge pad. Settling on the soft pile gathered on the right side of the bed, the tips of her toes humbly protruded from the well-padded long leg cast, looking like tiny pink islands in the Arctic Ocean of white plaster casts.

Horrifyingly, one single, contiguous shell contained most of her body, composed of an overlapping conglomeration of a Minerva cast, a shoulder spica cast, a velpeau cast and a hip spica cast. In addition, there was a detached long leg cast, which, somehow, wasn’t a building block of this extremely large cocoon.

Unlike his wife, who was chased by the Curse, Mike had survived the car crash unscathed, and now he sat at her bedside to console her from the first minute she had been admitted to the hospital. He could only imagine how desperate and helpless she must have felt.

With only four hours until midnight, he had no idea how to save her from the unstoppably approaching third full body cast. All their promising plans had failed or backfired, just causing Julie unnecessary trouble. Without a clear plan, he simply wanted to spend the remaining time with her.

‘There are still a few more accidents waiting for me out there. Unluckily, there’s still plenty of time before midnight.’ Julie expected a final jolt, which would send her into an all-encompassing, aptly crafted medical shell. Although her recent casts were large, they weren’t large enough for the Curse.

She looked enviously at Mike, who was free of casts. ‘Good to see you in one piece.’

‘It seems that this is your personal Curse, and not mine. It targets only you.’

Julie peered at her slender fingers at the end of the shoulder spica casts. She wiggled them. ‘Oh, my hands are not in casts. They’ve got only four hours of freedom at the most before they get their well-deserved casts... This is so unfair. Why me? I have to break... my pelvis... my jaw... my cheekbones...my fingers and my toes until midnight. And nobody can help me... We’ve been under the ground, but the Curse has found me. We’ve gone to a wizard... We’ve met a priest... There’s no hope.’

‘I’ll never give up trying to find a solution,’ Mike said, although he couldn’t give her any reassuring answer.

They didn’t know how to continue the stalled conversation, but just in time, a nurse entered the room.

‘Mrs Warden?’ she asked, looking at Julie.

‘Yes, it’s me,’ Julie said, wondering why the nurse had asked for her name. Was there another female patient in the hospital, with similar conditions, wrapped in plaster as large as hers?

‘I’m Nurse Christine, and Dr Ferris has sent me here to talk to you about your transfer.’

‘My transfer? Where to?’

‘As far as I know, Dr York, your treating physician at the Special Accident Care Unit, asked our medical director Dr Ferris to send you to his clinic.’

Julie made an interested face.

‘But Dr Ferris rejected his idea,’ the nurse said. ‘He informed Dr York that it would be too early to relocate you. We should wait at least a few days because of your extensive injuries.’

‘Thank God,’ Julie whispered with relief. It would be so dreadful if this day would end in another helicopter crash.

‘But Dr Ferris read all the documents sent from the SACU, and noticed that this was already the third time when you’ve had such big casts. He became very curious about you... I mean professionally curious. He wishes to talk with you, and he’d also like to conduct some new medical tests and examinations on you. Therefore, I’d like to take you down to the Examination Department, where the X-ray, MRI, CT and all the other necessary...’

Mike didn’t want Julie to leave this room. ‘Do you really have to do that?’

‘Dr Ferris insists on this request,’ the nurse said. ‘Sir, you should talk to him if...’

‘Let it happen, Mike.’ Julie remained calm, already swimming with the current, which carried her towards the full body cast. ‘We can’t hide from it.’

‘From what?’ the nurse asked, but received no answer.

Julie deterministically believed that she would get her full-sized cocoon, and there was nothing Mike could do to prevent her from being engulfed in the all-absorbing cast. The Invisible Hand of the Curse could strike her at any moment.

The nurse moved the wheeled bed out of the room and pushed the heavily casted patient down the quiet corridor of the ward. Fearing the next accident, Julie was far from enjoying the ride. She just wanted this damn day to be over.

At the end of the hallway, the short journey stopped at the lift shafts. Nurse Christine reached out to push the button. As the elevator door slid aside, she deftly rolled the gurney into the lift cabin with a light toss.

But just before Nurse Christine could enter the elevator, she noticed a woman hurrying down the corridor. She turned around to look at her.

‘Hi, Dora!’ Nurse Christine called out to get her attention.

The nurse happily stepped away from the lift door, already engrossed in a chat with her friend whom she hadn’t seen in years. She became completely oblivious to the medical sculpture nearby, which was formed from 100 pounds of human flesh and another 100 pounds of pure plaster.

‘Oh, my goodness, how long...?’ Nurse Christine greeted Dora with a warm hug. ‘For ages?’

‘No, just three years,’ Dora said, holding up her right hand. ‘And look what he gave me!’

A gold ring glittered on her ring finger.

Nurse Christine was thrilled. ‘Oh, wow! A wedding ring? You’ve finally done it! Please tell me how it happened! In Las Vegas?’

She intensely listened to the answer, unaware of the strange events unfolding in the lift. Dora, however, glanced over her friend’s shoulder, and her gaze locked on the lift door, but, unluckily, the words failed to come out.

The frightened expression on Dora's face alerted Christine that something was wrong. Making a sudden, 180-degree turn, she saw the lift door moving on its own. She quickly jumped there to prevent it from closing fully... but it was too late.

Julie was cordoned behind the rapidly shutting gate. Against the nurse’s will, the lift hermetically locked up, separating the patient in the sealed lift cabin from the people standing in the hallway.

The loud shouting called Mike out of Julie’s room. He stepped out into the corridor to stare at the empty spot where Julie’s bed should have been, and saw two women banging on a closed lift door. His heart pounded, as he felt the next strike of the Curse coming.

He hurried to the elevators. ‘What's happening here?’

‘We can’t open the door, and she's trapped inside!’ Nurse Christine cried out, hysterically slamming the door.

Realising it was too late to call the maintenance team, Mike tried to force the door open. However, even a trained man wasn’t strong enough to overcome the Curse.

Caught in the elevator car, and secured in solid plaster casts from head to feet, Julie was unable to do anything but lie passively on the bed. Her head, neck, torso, and all her limbs were held in plaster to prevent her from standing up and escaping.

‘Help! Get me out of here!’ she screamed, terrified at the thought of another accident.

Hearing the voice of his wife in despair, Mike intensified his efforts to open the door. But he failed.

‘Just hang on! We’ll get you out!’ he said, but even he couldn’t believe his own words.

In the shadow of the impending disaster, hoping for a miracle, Julie peered up at the lift control panel by the door. Physically, it was within arm's length, but also out of reach because her arm was completely immobilised in a rigid cast. When you're in large, confining casts, everything is difficult, especially pressing a bloody emergency button.

Julie was inescapably caged in the cabin. She glanced once more at the LED display and understood why she was there and why this was happening to her.

Maddeningly, a certain floor number was missing from the sequence. She saw the digits, one by one. 8..., 9..., 10..., 11..., 12..., 14..., 15...

Terrified of a specific number, the builders had symbolically skipped over it. Floor 13 was simply missing.

Julie had mistakenly thought she was on the 14th floor, but good old triskaidekaphobia had tricked her into coming here.

A strange sound came from the upper part of the elevator shaft. One after the other, the steel cables supporting the lift cabin snapped. Losing its secure grip, the compartment shuddered and began to descend.

It sank slowly at first, but then it gained speed. Starting from the thirteenth floor, it freefell towards the ground. For a fraction of a second, Julie’s cast-clad body rose from the bed, as she experienced the euphoric state of weightlessness. But, at the end of the short flight, she encountered the revenge of gravity.

This time, there was no parachute or haystack to cushion her landing.

to be continued

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