042 - The Mt Stillwell Hospice Resurrectionists

Cabal: The Mt Stillwell Hospice Resurrectionists

Nobody really thinks they’ll die.

It still happens. The Mt Stillwell Hospice provides medical, spiritual and emotional care to those for who this is not an abstract, distant worry but an impending certainty. Built atop a mountain retreat famed for the restorative powers of its spring water the idyllic greenery and invigorating climate provide calm and pleasant surroundings for people in their final days.

Owing to the machinations of one of its patients - now deceased - a group of residents and staff are embroiled in conflict over the pursuit of life after death. The members of the cabal all want different things, it would be relatively simple for any one of their desires to be fulfilled but only at the expense of the others. They currently have no group objective.

Nurse Jacklyn Carson has worked at Mt Stillwell for 6 years, she likes working here even though she’ll grouse about long shifts the same way anybody does. Giving respite to people who are in the final days of their lives is the closest she feels she’s ever had to a calling. To think it mightn’t have happened if it wasn’t the only job she could get.

Jacklyn almost got fired from her last job, in a hospital, for stealing and abusing painkillers. A back injury years prior had put her in the position of relying on Oxycontin to get through the day and her use snowballed out of control. Her knowledge of the chief nurse’s affair with one of the surgeons is the only reason she’s still registered and in return for her silence she was quietly moved instead of fired. A relapse in this bad habit was enough for hospice patient Eugene Ross to blackmail her into helping with his plan.

She deeply regrets it. Never especially religious, Jacklyn nonetheless maintains an agnostic belief in a christian god. Menaced by Eugene she has confided in Elgin Hetrick who, at first confused and later dismayed, has done his best to counsel her. She fears for her soul and wants to undo the damage she has done but is terrified of what Eugene might have in store if she tries.

Eugene Ross died last week. He planned on it.

A lifelong devotee of the occult, Eugene never fit in well with the underground. His beliefs were too old-fashionedly rigid for most and those who might have taken to him were rubbed the wrong way by his bigoted attitude. As far as Eugene was concerned he was always the most important person in any room he was in, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. So naturally he wanted to live forever.

He came close a couple of times during his career but due to bad luck and the fact that nobody liked him Eugene kept coming up empty handed. He got old and desperate and at the end of his tether he took the only option available to him, the ‘Cracking the Soul’ ritual he’d murdered a man for in Arkansas 20 years ago. He didn’t much like the idea of becoming a demon but it beat the alternative and he figured he could always find a way to resurrect himself afterwards.

Eugene secretly recorded nurse Jacklyn’s indiscretions and blackmailed her into agreeing to place his body in the spring under the foundations in return for them never coming to light. Demonstration of magick was enough to seal the deal and he possessed the timid physician Dr. Miles Garland after the fact to ensure that records of disposal for his body were falsified. Now he just has to figure out how to clean up the loose ends.

Elgin Hetrick is a retired religious studies and theology professor. He isn’t anything of a believer himself, his interest was the result of a lifelong, frustrated dedication to a search for meaning. Once a firebrand atheist he alienated his minister father who took his move into academic theology as a continued personal attack. Needless to say they didn’t get along.

From his own perspective Elgin never saw his attacks on organised religion (and he wasn’t picky about which he went after) as malicious. They were interrogative. Surely if any of these belief systems were true they would hold up to ruthless examination. Then Elgin would know, he’d have found the thing to invest his life in and fill the empty feeling in his heart. His life would have meaning.

He never found it. Every belief system had holes Elgin could not in good conscience reconcile with his rigorous standards. This didn’t come as the crushing disappointment he’d dreaded. Life had mellowed him and the experiences he’d had tempered his expectations, he’d lived well and known good people. He’d seen what there was and it was enough.

Waiting out the last of his days at Mt Stillwell he’s come to an appalling realisation, through Jacklyn Carson’s confession and the evidence he’s seen of Eugene’s demonic nature: he now knows he was wrong about everything. He’s doing his best to help the younger woman while floundering through a lifetime of tested and discarded beliefs to figure out the truth he missed. He wishes it were happening to a younger him.

Bobby Bruche desperately wants a second chance, it’s a reasonable desire considering he was barely given a first one. He’s only 18 and diagnosis of a degenerative brain condition means it’s unlikely he will see 20. On his good days he’s mostly functional. On his bad days he has mood swings, trouble speaking and needs crutches to get around. Most days are bad.

Bobby is a bad kid. He was a self-centred, bullying shit before his diagnosis and his impending mortality has made him even meaner to the point of being unmanageable. It’s half the reason his family have squirrelled him away here. Big and heavy he was used to using his size to push his way around, but having to interact with hospice staff instead of high school students and being occasionally robbed of the ability to move properly means he resorts to an unimaginatively foul mouth when he can’t. Some are sympathetic but no one really likes him.

He is Eugene’s unstable ace in the hole. Whispered promises of the ability to continue after illness claims his body, the dead occultist is trying to figure out how to use Bobby to make sure that Jacklyn and Elgin don’t spoil his afterlife. Bobby is starting to get his own ideas, he doesn’t trust Eugene and if he can get access to the ritual he won’t need him to live forever. He just needs to find where the hospice stored Eugene’s personal effects without the dead man noticing. He’ll hurt whoever he thinks is standing between him and his second chance if it comes to it.