WtAF Eloise Journal

The Journal of Eloise Danford

• The Vampire Hobo Affair: May 4th, 2014 In which we discover the existence of supernatural, and rescue James's sister from a vampire!
• Downtime: May 7th, 2014 - May 13th, 2014
• The Sad Story of Madelena: May 13th, 2014 - May 15th, 2014 In which we try to find a tragically-turned young vampire and instead run afoul of three older, vicious vampires.
• Downtime: May 18th, 2014
• The Mystery of Black Betty: May 22nd, 2014 - May 24th, 2014: In which we discover our altogether too-familiar Kindred Hospital to be haunted by tragedies of the past.

A photo of Luther Danford, tucked into the journal

May 18th, 2014 (Downtime)

Downtime
Dear Luther,
I've spent the majority of the last week at the hospital during my waking hours. While Josephine was admitted overnight, and stitched up, poor Daniel and Oz were in for a longer stay. The surgeons did good work on them, but they've got a longer road of healing ahead of them.

Oz is positively frantic to get out of the hospital. He's afraid - he wants to be behind a proper threshold, where vampires can't come in and get him. There is a certain vehemence to his insistence that is making me feel very sad and helpless, because it reminds me of his reactions when his mother left: desperate for some kind of control over what was happening in his life, doing anything he could think of to avoid thinking about the awful things going on. I do worry about him sometimes.

I spoke with some of the hospital administration about Daniel's medical bills. I would never bring this up to him directly, of course - the Frosts have always had their pride, even when they had little else - but I've spoken with some of them about the state of coverage programs. One of the financial officials - someone who'd been invited to one of the last Christmas parties we threw at the house just before you passed, apparently - said she'd look into the matter personally and see that the young man didn't fall on hard financial times because he isn't able to afford insurance.

Speaking of Daniel, I had a bit of a meaningful conversation with Josephine the day she was getting out of the hospital. She'd come to some realizations about Daniel's affections for her, and was scared. She confided in me some very personal things which I won't even repeat here (it's not the sort of thing I'd have shared with you when you were alive, either, so it seems wrong to include it here), but she's had some experiences that make it difficult for her to trust. We discussed that strange dynamic, and what it was like to be angry at those we love - you, Luther, and her father - for excluding us from this world of monsters, and the hypocrisy we felt having to do the same thing. She was very caring, and said some things that brought me quite a bit of peace with that anger with you. I hope she was right, Luther. I hope that by my remaining ignorant, my remaining safe, you were able to find some peace from the monstrousness and horror.

As an aside, I've been speaking with a doctor at the hospital, a lovely woman named Dr. Meredith Davies. She asked a lot of pointed questions about the injuries Daniel and Oz received, and some of our recent involvement with Magdalena, Karol and the other girls. I don't think she knows what goes on "behind the scenes" as it were, but I think she suspects something. And she's rather got the haunted demeanor of someone that perhaps has seen some things they can't explain.

The day is coming when we won't be able to simply take the boys in to the hospital anymore, and Dr. Davies mentioned having difficulty getting enough hours. I may very well see if she'd be amenable to picking up extra income here and there by coming over to the House to help stitch us Josephine and the boys when the need rears its ugly head. I'm having some of the downstairs space cleared out and turned into an infirmary for just such a time. The back storage space will serve perfectly, and we can store medical supplies and the like in the old silver and glass storage (which is all but empty these days). I'm going to talk to Robert about putting up a wall to separate it from the rest of the storage, and perhaps make the only method of getting into it is through the wine cellar entrance to that area. He's confident of his ability to mount one of the wine shelves on a track in front of the door, so we'd have a hidden medical area tucked away from the workshop (vital if we're going to have someone that isn't one of us tending to our wounded).

May 22nd, 2014 (Episode Three)

Session 6 (9/10/2014)
Dear Luther,
Things have taken a turn for the dramatic. I received an oddly ominous phone message from Oz, indicating that he was afraid the hospital was haunted, and claiming the he and Daniel had seen a ghost! She was the ghost of a nurse, a young black woman seemingly from before the sixties or so.

While he chattered and complained in my ear through the damned headset thing he got me (I admit to taking it off - it hugs my head too tightly, and the bands make me sweat beneath them and you know how I feel about such things), I did some reading. Shortly after, Josephine and James arrived to help me with the reading.

James is a marvel! His time in university clearly did him a great deal of good. Not only is he good at research, but he is very organized and orderly. Oz and I usually end up in a sprawl of books, flipping through this and that as we find them. Not James - we divided books among us, taking care to note possibly important pages while he took extensive notes not just of what he found, but also of what Josephine and I discovered and read to him (and thence to Oz).

We discovered a great deal of information regarding ghosts in general, and about what drives them away, what destroys them and what prevents their passage (salt, as it turns out). I sent Oz and Daniel a care package of salt (hidden under a bag of cookies) through Jaye (thank God for that antisocial night owl!) while we continued to research. I will admit that we wound down fairly rapidly after several straight hours of hard, efficient research. I fear I was already nodding off when Daniel and Oz struck up a conversation with a nurse about the ghost they call "Black Betty" (an appalling nickname, of course).

I said goodnight to everyone (including Oz and his communications device, which I am not wearing all the time no matter what he thinks) and came upstairs. I thought I should take a moment to write in the journal, to tell you what is going on, before bed.

Goodnight, my love. I still miss you terribly.

May 24th, 2014 (Episode Three)

Session 7 (9/24/2014)
Dear Luther,
I'm afraid that the others are going to be very cross with me. If I'm being perfectly truthful, they've a right to be.

I spent the day yesterday helping to get Oz out of the hospital. He'd had just about enough, and I was afraid he was going to simply try and walk out of there if we didn't get him out. So, I went down to help him get out of there, and even made arrangements with one of the doctors on staff to act in a private capacity in terms of his home care. They agreed that he could come back to my home, where I've opened up some of the domestics wing and turned the rooms out there. Honestly, seeing the way this kind of thing works, I suspect all of us will be spending some amount of time in recuperation from these hunts.

Oz's sister Jessica was there when I got there. I don't know if you'd remember her - she came over to our home once or twice during the family parties we'd throw and invite the Carmichaels to. She was the cute little blonde girl who was altogether too bossy for her own good. That tendency has unfortunately carried itself into a career in law, where she's now convinced she has the right and authority to tell everyone what to do. She and I had something of a terse but polite conversation on the topic of not telling other adults how to live their lives.

We got Oz settled in at the house after a stop off at his shop and his home. He's of course champing at the bit to do some more research (he's very enthusiastic about reading through all those books in a purposeful way), with me playing nursemaid. I ended up having to lock the door of the workshop downstairs lest he haul himself down there to do more reading and risk injuring himself. So very headstrong. So very like his mother, though I'd never tell him that.

As Josephine and James did more research at the city library, they discovered that most of the deaths we're attributing to the ghost were of folk who were white. Upon hearing this, Daniel was positively in an Oz-like froth to get out of the hospital himself! He was so adamant that he was prepared to simply walk out, waiting be damned. So, rather than see him do so and do him injury, or work himself into a tizzy and possibly give the medical staff a reason to question his mental fitness, I stepped in and spoke with one of the doctors, a Dr. Meredith Davies.

Dr. Davies is a very pleasant young doctor, although I couldn't help but overhear her complaining about the cut-backs in terms of hours and pay that have come as a result of Detroit's slow decline. She agreed to sign Daniel's release papers when I assured her that I'd be overseeing his care alongside Oz's, especially since I'd helped arranged Daniel's care be tended by the hospital's Good Samaritan Fund. He faster he was out of there, the more there would be for others who also needed the help. Along those lines, I asked her if she'd be willing to drop by and see to their home care, in exchange for some amount of compensation, wholly under the table.

What a sad place our city has become, Luther, when a talented young woman such as Dr. Davies needs to take on such work to make ends meet, even if it is to our benefit that she does so.

James and Josephine discovered that the young woman whose ghost became called Black Betty was probably killed in the late fifties, and possibly by some construction workers. As part of the research, I managed to get my good friend David Edelstein to email me the hospital construction plans from the time when she disappeared, and we discovered a likely location where her remains might have possibly been hidden. It's a horrifying thought - that poor young woman.

We got Daniel ensconced at home as well, and had the whole group over for dinner (thank God for April). Over dinner in the new sitting room that is adjacent to the rooms I'm setting up for the others, it was decided that we ought to do something about the ghost of "Black Betty" that very night. With Oz and Daniel out of commission, Robert agreed to come along as an extra hand, which I was thankful for.

My job, of course, was to remain with the car (which I encircled with salt) and monitor what was going on through the headset thingys of Oz's (he and Daniel were of course listening from their beds). They found the old section of hospital, and I listened to Robert bluff his way past an attendant quite handily (the Irish rascal that he is).