The Cellar of the Drowned Saint

My mother’s surgery at the sprawling St. Aurelia’s Medical Center in the outskirts of Marseille had gone well, but the doctors insisted she remain for observation in the old wing. The new towers gleamed with glass and light, but the old wing, a relic from the turn of the century, huddled behind them like a weathered tombstone. Her room was on the third floor, Number 307, at the end of a long corridor that smelled of antiseptic and something older, like damp stone. From the window, you could see the crypt-like chapel below, its dome cracked and stained.

I visited her every afternoon, bringing fresh flowers that seemed to wilt within hours. The room itself was oddly cold, even in the summer heat, and the walls bore faint water stains that, if you stared too long, seemed to form a crooked halo. I always felt a pressure in my chest there, a sense that I was being watched from the corner by the armoire, but I chalked it up to my own dread of hospitals. My mother, however, began to grow restless. On the third day, she insisted she was fine and demanded to go home, against medical advice. I tried to reason with her, but she was adamant, her eyes darting to that corner. I signed the discharge papers.

It wasn’t until we were in the car, driving along the coastal highway, that she finally spoke. Her voice was thin, like dry leaves. ‘There was a woman in my room,’ she said. ‘Every night, after midnight, she stood in that corner by the armoire. She wore a white gown, like a nurse from a century ago, and a white headscarf. She didn’t move, just stared. The first night, I thought it was the painkillers. But the second night, I saw her more clearly. She had no face. Just a smooth, blank space where her features should be. And she kept pointing to the floor, as if there were something beneath the room.’ I gripped the steering wheel, my knuckles white. ‘Mother, you were on the third floor,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing beneath but the chapel.’

When we got home, I tried to dismiss it as a hallucination from the anesthesia, but my mother wouldn’t let it go. She started having nightmares, waking up screaming about the faceless woman and the pointing. She refused to sleep alone, so I set up a cot in her room. On the third night, I woke to find her standing at the window, staring out at the garden. ‘She’s here,’ she whispered. ‘She’s standing in the rose bush. She’s pointing at the ground.’ The garden was empty, but a cold draft seeped through the closed window, and I felt a chill crawl up my spine.

I decided to do some research. I found old records online about the hospital, specifically the old wing. It had originally been a convent, built in the 1800s, and beneath it was a crypt for the nuns. But the crypt had been sealed off in the 1920s after a scandal—one of the nuns had drowned herself in a fountain, and her body was never recovered. The official story was that she had been possessed by a demon. I remembered the water stains, the way they formed a halo shape. I was about to close the laptop when my mother came into the room, her face pale. ‘I remember now,’ she said. ‘The woman in the white gown—she looked like the painting in the chapel, the one of Saint Maria. But in the painting, she has a face. Why does the woman have no face?’

That evening, my mother’s health took a sudden turn. She developed a fever, and her wounds began to ooze a strange, dark fluid. The doctors were baffled. They moved her back to the hospital, this time to the new tower, but she only worsened. In her delirium, she kept repeating, ‘The water is rising, the saint is pointing.’ I sat by her bedside, watching her drift in and out of consciousness. On the third night, I dozed off in the chair. I was jolted awake by a sound like dripping water. I opened my eyes. In the corner of the room, by the window, stood a figure. It was a woman in a white gown and headscarf, just as my mother described. But this time, I could see a faint, translucent quality to her, and her hands were locked in a pointing gesture toward the floor. The air grew cold, and I saw a puddle of water forming beneath her. She was pointing to the exact spot where, according to my research, the crypt was located.

I snapped out of my terror and ran to the nurses’ station. I frantically told them about the crypt, about the drowned nun, about the pointing. They dismissed me, but I was adamant. I demanded to see the hospital’s old blueprints. A reluctant administrator finally pulled them, and we found a stairwell that had been walled off, leading down from the chapel. The next day, I took a crowbar and descended into that forgotten place. The air was thick with humidity and decay. At the bottom, I found a small, stone-lined room. There was a fountain, broken and dry, and in the center, a plaque: ‘In memory of Sister Agathe, who drowned in this fountain, 1897.’ And there, in the dust, was a piece of white cloth, like a headscarf.

I brought the cloth back to the surface, and as I did, my mother’s fever broke. She woke up, lucid, and asked for water. She said the woman had been standing there, and as I left, the woman had finally turned and walked through the wall. She never saw her again. But sometimes, when I look at my mother sleeping, I see a faint, watery imprint on the wall behind her bed, shaped like a pointing hand. And I wonder if the saint is still pointing, waiting for us to find what else lies beneath.