Dobb’s Hill - An Introduction

Dobb’s Hill began its morbid life enshrouded by the dark shadow cast by Queen Victoria’s passing and it is with little melodrama that most claim it has failed to emerge from such a black inauguration. Death and madness were there at the hospital’s inception and it’s believed by many they never left the wards. Allegations and Chinese whispers have been rife throughout its ill-fated existence and this has led to what some consider a distortion of the truth. With poor information, the fables started young and have only grown stronger with age. Supposedly designed by a sadistic architect who slipped into insanity and built by a contractor hung for murdering his architect, rumours regarding the place were perhaps inevitable for a solitary hospital hidden amongst the dense foliage of the Scottish Highlands. Ghosts and goblins were bound to walk its sterile corridors, as were things that go bump in the night. But these were merely the thoughts of the feeble minded. The childish fears of overdramatic theatricals who refuse to cross the hospital’s threshold, even when their pain demands medication.

Yet all rumour is based on an element of fact.

And the legends involving Dobb’s Hill Hospital are no different.

Indeed, the architect did go mad during the design process – a process that was so laborious, there are those who believe the hospital actually grew out of the ground; pushing the brittle grasses to one-side as it slowly emerged. A period of over ten years disappeared between the laying of the first stone and the admittance of the first patient. The builders changed with the wind as none could work with a designer who refused to give them full working drawings to build from. Money was lost, madness encroached and within hours of the last lick of paint being applied, the architect was dead and his final contractor arrested.

All of these are facts.

What is rarely whispered about is the architect’s mother for whom the hospital was erected, but who died years before its completion. Very few are brave enough to mention her name, but those who, do so in one harmonious and hostile voice, spitting the same statement: ‘she haunted her son till his dying day. It was her revenge for his failure to complete her nursing home in time. And she has continued to haunt the wards ever since.’
Perhaps that would explain the vile tortures that took place when the hospital was converted to a POW camp in 1943. Maybe the architect’s mother wandered the corridors and turned their occupiers mad. And maybe she visited the man who killed all of those patients in 1973 in a spree of madness that saw seven dead before he stuck the knife into his own throat. And what about the young patient admitted in 2003 who cannot stop having vile nightmares?

These are just thoughts and rumours, wrapped around a few basic facts.

But facts they are, and facts they shall always remain.

Dobb’s Hill’s life not only began with Queen Victoria’s death, but the architect’s, the builder’s and the architect’s mother.

There is little wonder it has failed to emerge from such a black inauguration

One
1943
Thick ropes bind wrists and ankles, securing the prisoner to the rack. With his naked body strapped tight, broken slats dig into the fresh whip scars mapping his back. Outstretched, he screams a sound so vile even his torturer winces as the mechanical wheel leaning over them turns and his joints are separated. Balls become dislodged from sockets. Cartilage snaps. Frenziedly thrashing his head with the electrical pulses raging through his ruined muscles, his eyes bulge, his mouth stretches to tearing point; his German tongue spits agonies a man from any walk of life could understand. Arian features distort, blond hair entangles in thick oily globs, bloody foam erupts over his chin. In his fear, he has vacated himself, smearing his legs in a foul cocktail but his anguish ensures he remains oblivious.

His body has already been savaged by a surgeon’s skilled hand – the vertical slit slicing his torso in two is perfectly straight, leading from throat to navel. Spilt blood congeals over his golden chest, pubic hair matted by a crimson gel. Sprinkled over his nudity is a snowstorm of salt where his persecutor has rubbed rocky granules into his wounds, lifting skin to force them inside. Cherry balls gather in a chest hair jungle. Beneath such ruination, his penis no longer resembles male genitalia. It is now more like a squashed clump of rancid tomatoes – the dogs ensuring it would never be recognised as a working organ again. At the base of his broken legs, toes are either missing or swollen, mutilated by a combination of hammer and saw.

They have been working on him for four hours now, and the rack is only one item in a long list of devises requiring his attendance. Lining the room’s stone walls, straps, chains, blades and hooks lie waiting, as do the surgical and gardening tools littering a bleeding concrete floor. Above, a fluorescent light illuminates the horror, impassive; staring down on a scene played a dozen times before. He looks into its glass heart, pleading for mercy, desperate for release, but the individual dressed in a surgeon’s clothes leans over him, cigarette in hand. Blue smoke obscures the view.
“Tell us”, he whispers in a gravelled voice, barely audible over the man’s acute screeching.

“Ich weiß nicht”, he screams, “Ich weiß nicht!”

I don’t know. I don’t know.

His words struggle to emerge from a mouth without teeth. Removed within moments of his capture, his guards yanked them out as a means of eliminating the risk of any cyanide capsules being secreted somewhere in his mouth. Crowns can be difficult to identify in poor light, therefore it is best to not take any chances. All were pulled and crushed. With unprecedented mercy, the procedure was performed whilst he’d lay unconscious, chloroform fumes holding him back from reality’s nightmares. Such compassion had little to do with wanting to treat their prisoner with respect; it was to ensure he did not outwit them and commit suicide before they could get to work on his damaged body.

The torturer demonstrates his frustration at his prisoner’s denial. Eyelashes melt under the cigarette’s burning embers. Squealing an inhuman cry, the German squeezes his lids tight shut but this cannot prevent his interrogator from crushing the thing into his eye. He pushes it deep, forcing it through disintegrating skin. The reek of burning flesh swarms up from the wound, replacing the stench of human waste that had had the torturer reaching for his perfumed surgical mask. Banshee-type shrieks bounce off cold surfaces. The prisoner thrashes his head against the rack and yells for all his might, calling to his God, begging for release.

Caustic bile erupts, merging with the rabid foam, smothering the man’s chin.

As if in disgust at the sight and the mauling his ears are receiving, the sadist discards the cigarette and slaps the man, cutting the cry off at its peak.
Tears stain the victim’s mutilated face; salt-water tributaries running over bloodied cheeks.

“Ich weiß nicht”, he whimpers, “Ich weiß nicht”.

His tormentor straightens and turns away, walking towards one of the many torturous instruments awaiting his touch. “You are a Nazi”, he growls.  “You follow orders. You have no notion of free speech and lack any ability to think for yourself. You do as you are told and nothing more. Therefore, you have information, information we require.” He picks up something the German’s ruined eyes cannot yet see. “So tell us. Tell us what we need to know, and this will end. Your suffering will be over.” He turns, revealing his latest means of torture. No matter how much pain he has felt, no matter how much fear he has tasted, the wounded man is not prepared for such an instrument. Despite his limbs being nothing more than lifeless trunks stuck to his torso, the German flings himself about, pushing against the binding ropes like a dying fish. Adrenalin flushes through his veins, aiding his futile attempt at freedom. The basic need to survive demands that he strive for freedom. That he rip his bones from these bounds and run as far and as fast he can.

The pain tearing through him severs all attempts at foolish bravery. It is as though steel rods have been forced through him, preventing his body from obeying the brain’s basic commands. Each time he tries to move, an electrical charge is sent through the rods, demanding that he lie still. There is nowhere for him to go, and no means by which he can get there.

He slumps back onto his cruel mattress, succumbing to the desperation.

“Ich weiß nicht, ich weiß nicht.” These are the last words he whispers before his once virile heart gives itself up to the shock and ends its endeavours. The last thing he sees is the blue flame of the blow torch as it is held over his bleeding mouth.

His good eye turns to glass as life vacates him.

“Shit!”

His persecutor watches him die. For a few moments, the room is filled only by the sound of the torch’s blue flame. He stares down at his quarry, watching him expel himself over the rack one last time. His surgical mask cannot hide his disappointment. Whether he is disappointed because his charge has died before disclosing his information or before he had completed his torturous tasks, it is impossible to say. Exasperated, he turns the torch off and replaces it back amongst the gathering of cruel tools lying on the floor. Walking past the corpse, he begins to remove his blood-spattered attire, revealing the doctor’s uniform beneath. He wipes at the sweat smothering his forehead, oblivious to the blood speckles lodged within the folds of the scar beneath his hairline.

Opening the door out onto the corridor, he fills the cell with the screams emanating from the other eleven rooms secreted about the hospital’s cellars.

 

If I’ve whetted your appetite and you’re desperate to read more of my work, then get in contact via the contacts page. For the tiniest of tiny fees (certainly a lot less than you’d expect to pay on certain auctioning websites) I’ll email the requested manuscript across in a .pdf format – complete with spelling and grammar mistakes!! Then, if I do make to the big time, you’ll have a collector’s item – and as I said, all for the tiniest of tiny fees!! (Did I make the bit about the fees clear? They really are tiny.)