“Alright, Gramps, it’s time to spill. What’s going on here?”

            The four of them were seated at the small dining room table in Grandpa Tuesday’s cramped house. Johnny, Paul, Ash, and old man Tuesday himself. He had ushered them inside as soon as Meg and Agent King had left. The three teenagers were facing the older man expectantly. Surely, he would have answers for them, or at the very least a way to escape the coming disaster.

            “So, you kids,” he began. “You’ve been snooping around, haven’t you? You’ve been getting yourselves into trouble.”

            “More like getting ourselves into nightmares,” Johnny protested. “It’s not like we went looking for some crazy monster in the hospital.”

            “So, the hospital was where you found it? Tell me, what did it look like?”

            “She looked like an old-timey hospital nurse at first. You know, with those pointy hats they used to wear and everything? But then she went nuts and started coming after us. She was insanely fast, too, like way faster than any human could possibly be.”

            “She did… things that shouldn’t have been possible, too,” Paul added. “Meg told us that she plucked her eye out with her bare hands or something.”

            “Sucked it out with a needle,” Ash corrected.

            “Right,” Paul shivered.

            “Hmm, that certainly matches with the other reports,” said Tuesday, half to himself. “From the sounds of things, you kids are pretty damn lucky, all things considered. Not only did you all manage to escape alive, but you walked right into that creature’s lair and got away without witnessing what it’s really capable of. If you had, I’m certain you wouldn’t be able to talk about this so calmly.”

            “What are you talking about?” said Paul.

            “It might be best to start with what you all already know. Outside, you said you knew about 1956, but I’d wager you don’t know the full extent of what truly happened that summer. It’s been covered up quite well.”

            “Well,” said Ash. “We know there was supposedly some plague that year, something that killed a huge chunk of the town’s population, but somehow never spread anywhere else. But that isn’t true, is it? It was this monster who killed all those people, but we don’t know what it is or why.”

            “Well, that’s the gist of it. In 1956, nearly fifty years ago to the day, there was a terrible tragedy in this town. It wasn’t a mysterious plague as the news reports say, but something much more terrifying. Something else was living in that hospital.”

            “The same thing that found us the other day. Just what exactly is in there?” asked Johnny.

            “I’m afraid I don’t know everything myself. I was just a lucky survivor. It started very similar to the incidents now. People would disappear mysteriously, leaving no trace. As much as we looked and looked, we never found them. Except then, it wasn’t from the town that people were disappearing, but from Jefferson Hospital. It was still in operation back then, you see, being a fairly new facility. But it declined quickly once the disappearances started. Patients would go missing from their hospital beds sometime in the night, as though they had simply vanished. Not just patients, but staff, too. Most were never accounted for, but some bodies were found… they all had missing eyes. After a couple of weeks, folks got so paranoid that they stopped showing up to work and the whole place just shut down. The remaining patients were transferred to smaller clinics and the place was abandoned and deemed unsafe.

            “We thought that would be the end of it, but the night after the last person left, the entire town was attacked. Nobody ever saw who did it, but one by one every person who set foot in that hospital was killed in their sleep, all with their eyes plucked out of their skulls.

            “Well, I was still a young man at the time and I knew that I had to do something, so I got a couple of friends and we all headed up to the hospital with metal bats and guns to find the thing that did this and kill it. Idiots that we were, we thought ourselves invincible. I was the lucky one. When we got there, though, I got cold feet. I never went inside. As for my friends, that monster was waiting for them.”

            “What happened?” asked Ash.

            “They were far less lucky than the lot of you.” He seemed lost in thought for a moment. “There’s a feeling that divers or astronauts get, when they stare into the vast depths of the ocean or the emptiness of space. They feel alone, helpless, like the darkness could swallow them whole and not even notice. I imagine what they experienced was something like that. It was chaotic and bloody. I have some difficulty remembering the details.”

            “But you escaped, right? Same as us.” asked Johnny.

            Tuesday nodded. “By the time morning came, my friends were all dead, same M.O. as all the other victims. I know the only reason I survived was due to my own cowardice, but I knew that I couldn’t rest until I learned what this thing was and if there was any way to stop it from striking again. I owed them at least that much. So, I started researching the town’s history, trying to figure out if something like this had happened before. It wasn’t long after I began my search, though, that I was stopped suddenly and forcefully.

            “It was the chief of police, Hammond Jackson. He made it abundantly clear to me that if I continued snooping, my family and I would suffer consequences. That shut down my investigation quite suddenly. It was soon after that the news was reported about a mysterious plague had swept through the town, soon dubbed the Contagion of ’56. People latched onto the more believable story quite rapidly and now you won’t find a soul here that remembers events as they really happened. Now Hammond’s position has been replaced with his son Eric and I’d wager he seems perfectly content with following in his father’s footsteps.”

            “So in other words,” said Johnny, sounding frustrated. “You’re saying that we really don’t know anything.”

            “Not exactly,” said Tuesday. I was able to pick up a few bits of information, useless as they are. For one, I know for a fact this has never happened before in the town’s history. Whatever the origin of this thing is, it’s tied to that hospital in some way. I also know that this monster is deadly and efficient. Anyone who sets foot in that hospital, it will kill, without fail. It doesn’t matter what you do or where you go; it will find you. There is no fighting against it. I’m sorry you kids had to find out like this. Damn it Johnny, why did you have to go there?!” he cried.

            The room was silent. Nobody seemed to want to speak or even blink. The only person who might have been capable of helping had handed them what was effectively a death sentence. It was Ash who broke the silence, standing up as she did so.

            “I won’t accept that. We can’t give up, especially not now. We had to kick Meg out of town before she was ever able to find out the truth. She’s one of us now, and we owe it to her to survive until we can tell her ourselves.”

            “Ash is right,” said Paul, standing beside her. “I don’t care what it takes, I won’t let my family go through what you just described to us. We’ll fight back against this thing, no matter what it takes.”

            “Jesus, you guys really are serious about this,” Johnny grumbled. “Alright, fine, I’ll help too. We’ll go home, get whatever we need, then regroup here in an hour and make a plan, yeah?”

            “You kids,” said a shocked Bill Tuesday. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” It was just like him fifty years ago. He and his friends had a similar confidence and ego, one that had been snuffed out like a candle, never to be fully reignited. As he looked further, though, he saw something in their eyes, all three of them. A fire that he had never seen before, not even in himself.

            “Don’t worry, Gramps,” said his grandson. “We’ve been training for this, right guys? We didn’t form the Paranormal Research Club for nothing. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not just gonna wait around to die. We’re fighting back!”